


a little more stupid, a little more scared

by liminalweirdo, slowlimbs



Series: You've Got A Glow [1]
Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti), IT - Stephen King
Genre: Alternate Universe - Pennywise is Defeated in the First Battle (IT), Beverly Marsh & Richie Tozier Are Best Friends, Dubious Consent, Emotional self-harm, Emotional/Psychological Abuse, Gay Richie Tozier, Homophobic Language, Infanticide, Knifeplay, M/M, Mentioned Infanticide (less explicit than the novel), Mildly Dubious Consent, Mutual Pining, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Physical Abuse, Richie Tozier can't control his mouth, Slow Burn, Voyeurism, Young Adult Losers Club (IT), so much pining
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-02-23
Updated: 2021-03-07
Packaged: 2021-03-13 00:34:02
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 48,174
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29643078
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/liminalweirdo/pseuds/liminalweirdo, https://archiveofourown.org/users/slowlimbs/pseuds/slowlimbs
Summary: When Eddie comes out to Richie and Bev, Richie finds himself too little too late to express his own feelings, and struggles to come to terms with Eddie's relationship with another man.ORRichie pines. Eddie gets a boyfriend. Mistakes are made.
Relationships: Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier, Patrick Hockstetter/Richie Tozier, background Eddie Kaspbrak/OC, offscreen Ben Hanscom/Beverly Marsh
Series: You've Got A Glow [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2178195
Comments: 5
Kudos: 23





	1. i-v

**Author's Note:**

> This started off as a reddie fic for us, too, and blossomed into something... different.
> 
> This is the first part of a two-part series, but this part is the reddie part. You'll see where it goes.
> 
> Richie's sister being called Peg is taken from (the truly incredible) [In Fact, Everything's Got That Big Reverb Sound](https://archiveofourown.org/works/20385259) by dystopiary, because slowlimbs and I were somehow both convinced that Peg Tozier was her name in canon. In the end, it made sense that both women in the family might be named Margaret so... it's a headcanon now.
> 
> PLEASE BE WARNED: there is some mild dubcon in this fic, tread carefully.

**i**

Richie likes working the bar, most nights. He likes the work and the rush of the nighttime crowd — time flies when you’re busy. Moving in with Bev and Eddie has probably been one of his better decisions, although sometimes he wonders if Eddie is genuinely annoyed by his presence which just makes him act more fucking annoying because there is definitely something wrong with him. But they had a third bedroom, above the bar, and it’s the smallest of the three, since he came into the arrangement late, but Richie doesn’t mind that. He barely spends any time in there anyway, but still, sometimes he wonders if he’s taking up space he shouldn’t. When he brought his stuff, Bev was clearly using the space as a studio, but since he showed up, that’s all since moved to her room and, occasionally the kitchen table and, sometimes, before they’re open in the mornings, the tables downstairs in the bar.

And it’s weird, but he feels like he’s interfering less with Bev’s life than Eddie’s. Like Eddie maybe avoids him sometimes or gives him these quick irritated looks that set Richie’s blood on fire and makes him yak yak yak until he can get him to smile even a little bit. It’s mornings in the kitchen where Richie feels like a fucking hurricane, blocking Eddie at every turn as he tries to make coffee or his lunch for work. Poking, crowding into his space until Eddie finally finally touches him, shoves him away, or — best of all — laughs and tells him he’s a lunatic which Richie knows already, but it’s nice to hear it, when it’s Eddie’s bright brown eyes on his, when it’s Eddie’s smiling mouth.

Maybe if he annoyed him less, things would feel more like they do with him and Bev. Maybe that’s how they’re supposed to feel. Like, calm, almost. He never feels calm with Eddie. He always feels like he’s vibrating from the inside out, like his spine’s a tuning fork. _Please, please, look at me._

Only lately it’s less ‘look at me’ and more ‘see me, see _me_ ,’ and that makes him feel kind of sick because… because it means… 

Flicker of movement, unmistakable, because Richie knows how he moves. How he looks in his peripheral, could recognize him anywhere, even in a crowd, even in the dim lights of the bar in the evening. Richie looks up fast from the beer he’s filling from the tap. “Eddie!” He practically thrusts it at the customer and then paces the length of the bar to catch up with Eddie before he disappears. 

And okay, so it’s not exactly that he _irritates_ or _annoys_ Eddie. They aren’t the right words. Richie _frustrates_ him. Reminds him of everything he’ll probably never have — he’s genuine and bright and comfortable, he’s fine being unwashed and having clothes with holes in them, he’s fine working ungodly hours in the bar. Eddie wishes he had even the barest amount of that fucking— distaste for capitalism. But he likes his designer clothes, likes his expensive coffee, likes the fancy toiletries he gets from the mall. He likes chain stores, likes boutiques, likes being _clean_. 

Which he never is, when he comes home from work, because the garage is a nine hour slog of laying under cars and working with his hands until they’re black with oil (and he likes that, too, but has no idea how to reconcile the two facets of him into one thing), so when Richie says his name he offers a grease stained smile and raises a grease stained hand.

“Not right now, Jesus, I need to shower. Have you seen this shit?” Gestures down at his t-shirt, the blue overalls with their arms knotted around his waist, covered in grime. “Fucking— those new fucking Land Rovers, man. Gorgeous but fucking _messy_.” He’s sure it’s a factory issue. He’s had three of them in the last month and each one ends up needing draining. And he always ends up covered in muck. “I fucking stink, you’re gonna lose customers.”

And Richie takes him in, the weird juxtaposition of Eddie dirty, and there’s a weird tug in his gut that’s both That Summer and Pipes and Greywater and Clown Vomit that he tries not to think about that mingles weirdly, in an unsettled way with _oh, fuck_ because he looks _good_. And maybe Richie likes to see him a little bit messed up. 

“Can’t you even say hello to me properly, darling?” Richie asks, trying to drown out the hot lash of desire that starts in his belly and whips up to his throat. The edge of the bar digging into his stomach as he leans over it towards him. “I’ve been slaving over beers on tap all day long and you won’t even kiss me hello?” He grins at him, wide and wicked. He grabs a napkin, licks it, and lunges to wipe at a smear of oil on Eddie’s cheek. 

“Jesus fuck, no, stop that.” Eddie bats him away with one hand, wiping his own face with the back of the other. “You look like my mom when you do that. And I have no idea where your mouth has been and it’s fucking flu season. I’m sure slaving over the bar all day is tough but I’ve been under cars for twice as fucking long _and_ I’ve had to deal with dudebros thinking they know more than me about my own fucking job, thanks.” He just wants a shower, dinner, and bed. God he wants bed so much. Twists away from him and catches his wrist and then, in a moment of daring and fireworks behind his brain, sticks his tongue out and licks it. Carefully avoiding his palm and fingers, because germs, just gross enough to force Richie away.

Because if Richie keeps touching him, like that, one day he’s going to snap and go insane. Go fucking postal with desire.

“I’ll try not to use all the hot water.”

Richie’s brain, meanwhile, short-circuits. Eyes wide and dark behind his glasses. He makes a noise like “Hngh?!” but it works because he lets Eddie go. He’s struck dumb for a moment, standing as still as a deer in headlights, but then suddenly it’s: “I’ll be thinking about you!” he calls after him, and it sounds like a joke somehow. His brain’s going _what?!_ So he adds “C— cold water will shrink your balls!”

 _Duh_. He thinks, and his mind’s already concocting something like _I can stand to have some shrinkage,_ but then he can’t tell if that’s too weird. It can’t be any more fucking weird than _I’ll be thinking about you._

“Like yours could get any smaller!” Is what he gets back, instead, and then Eddie is thinking about Richie’s balls and won’t use all the hot water because suddenly he’s warm all over, head down when he waves at Bev, slamming the bathroom door and shedding clothes like they’re going to give him rashes.

Fucking Richie Tozier. He takes several deep breaths, turning the stream all the way around to ‘colder than a witches tit’ and sticking his head under the flow. It’s always been like this, since they were kids. Richie touching and prodding and saying things which when they were little would make him angry, embarrassed, loathsome; giving way slowly and then all at once to things which made him _think_ , made him _feral_ , made him _react_. He doesn’t have that same childhood temper anymore, doesn’t want to punch Richie so that he shuts up about his mom or his dick or his fucking inhaler. He wants to make him shut up but he doesn’t know _how_. Richie says the shit he says and then Eddie consistently remembers them in the dead of night when downstairs is so loud he can’t sleep, when he’s got his hand in his boxers and he’s rutting against the mattress like he _is_ a teenager again. It’s always been like this. It isn’t fucking fair.

**ii**

By the time Richie goes upstairs at the end of the night, Eddie’s door is firmly shut and Beverly is maybe sleeping, maybe not, so he goes to tap on her door but there’s no answer.

He cracks the window in what’s meant to be the dining room and has just ended up being a place for books and papers and things which don’t have a place in the house yet, and he tangles himself in amongst them to smoke out the window because Eddie’s always on about nicotine stains on the walls which are there from the last occupants _anyway_ even though once Richie scrubbed them all off one evening in a fit of manic energy borne from just one too many glimpses: of Eddie towelling his hair dry after the shower, getting his laundry from the dryer in the morning, wearing only his underwear, washing his shirts in the kitchen sink, with his sleeves pushed up to his elbows, scrubbing at stains. It’s something he no longer tries to forget — that’s useless anyway. It’s just that there’s only so many times you can rub one out thinking about your best friend, your roommate, the person you knew when you were eight and ten and twelve…

Sometimes, like this, after a long shift, surrounded by the quiet of the very early morning with his cigarette and his friends sleeping around him, he feels like he should also feel quiet, but he never does. He feels like he wants to tear things up, like he wants to scream into the relative silence of the street, like he wants to push open the door to Eddie’s room and climb into his bed and say _just fucking look at me, see me, hold onto me, just for a second._

He never does. He finishes his cigarette in shivery silence that feels like anticipation and imagines the street eroding, a gas explosion, and wonders if he’s meant to predict a future disaster and that’s why he’s like this. Why he’s always been like this. Only it never comes. Just that one time in the car with Peg when he saw the car run the red light and knew there was going to be impact before she did. Remembers the violent sideways jostle, but the car had only caught the back of theirs, because Peg always sped _a little_. Remembers their parents’ anger and how it was the first time he’d seen Peg cry since she still lived at home and she’d hugged him hard, afterward, even though neither of them were _really_ hurt. It’s weird shit like that makes Richie realize that people love him, at least in theory. Maybe Peg loves him because she’s supposed to, but at least she does. At least there’s that.

Sometimes he feels like he spends every day since waiting for that impact to come again.

**iii**

The catalyst, maybe, comes a month or so after the wrist-licking incident. Eddie gets a fucking _boyfriend_ , which is something he himself never expected. And Felix is nice. He’s all charming smiles and a warm, firm hand in the small of Eddie’s back, fancy restaurants and fancy car (which is how they’d met, Eddie filthy and exhausted and handing him his keys back, those fingers grasping around his and that charming smile glaring down into his face and Eddie tries not to think and thinks anyway: _you fucking fag Kaspbrak_ ), and Eddie is so tired of being alone and being untouched that it just seems like the best option. 

So he lets Felix take him out for a date. And then another, and another, and on the fourth one he nuts up and takes him home. Opens the door for him and tucks himself under his arm and is flushed and already a little wine drunk and happy when he waves to Richie behind the bar, takes Felix through to where there are booths and sits him down and kisses his cheek in a quick breathless moment which reminds him of his mother. Which is a weird thing to think about one’s boyfriend. 

Felix gives him the money to pay for the drinks, which is even weirder. Wraps an arm around his waist and pulls him in for a proper kiss and smacks his ass when he turns to go back and order and: _you fucking fag, Kaspbrak._ But no one around them seems to care, so Eddie tries not to. It’s the nineties. People are gay all the time now.

Richie doesn’t see them come in — at least not in the way he notices whenever Eddie come in. Not until Eddie waves at him, and then Richie does a double take. He doesn't recognize the guy Eddie’s with but it must be Felix. 

Felix, who Eddie had told him and Bev about just under a month ago over dinner one evening and Richie had been frozen with a forkful of pasta halfway to his mouth, feeling like he’d just been hit by a fucking truck. Because it’s like— he never— it’s not like he didn’t _wonder_ (hope), he did. But he just never fucking expected the whole ‘I’m gay’ conversation also involving ‘I’m seeing someone,’ and that just seems so wildly, cosmically fucking unfair. It’s so _fucking_ unfair that Richie has to force himself to sit still at the table, one leg jiggling madly beneath it, force himself to keep eating, force himself to say “Let me know if you want me to teach you how to french kiss, Spaghetti, I’ve had lots of practice with your mom,” instead of what he wants to say which is—

(Somewhere, in the room Richie’s fucking astral projected out of, Beverly saying she already knew)

_—Why didn’t you tell me, why didn’t you tell me so I could—_

(Beverly telling him not to worry, of course they don’t see him differently, speaking for Richie too because he’s eating so fast on autopilot he thinks he might choke)

_—Why did you go and find someone who isn’t—_

He hears himself saying: “Obviously not, Eds. I’ll always see you as cute cute…”

Richie goes out for a 'walk' after dinner and just runs and runs and runs and _runs_ until he can barely breathe. Until he’s retching on the side of the road somewhere, but nothing comes up.

He doesn’t cry in the shower. He doesn’t cry himself to sleep. Just digs his fingertips into his sides, below his ribs, curls around himself in his bed, until the hurt feels kind of the same. 

Now, in the bar, Richie watches them kiss, or rather, he catches it by accident and looks away so fast he almost gives himself whiplash. It’s the smack on the ass he catches when he can’t keep his eyes trained elsewhere. And worse than that, the way Eddie doesn’t retaliate at all. Not the way he would if Richie tried it (and he has). By the time Eddie reaches the bar his heart is beating with such force he feels like there’s a rave beat pounding up through him, through the floor, shaking his bones out of place.

“Is that your fella?” he asks, managing, somehow, a smile. “Jesus, Eds. Look at you.” But he can’t look at Eddie, can’t meet his eyes at all, so he keeps them trained on Felix instead.

“That’s the one.” And he can’t tell if the flush is from pleasure or embarrassment, whether he’s smiling because he doesn’t know what else to do or if he’s happy about such a public display of affection, if the glance he sends Felix’s way is loving or furtive. All of it could mean so many things. And he thinks if he just— keeps doing what he’s doing then eventually he’ll stop feeling the way he does about Richie. One day. 

Because at this point it’s been fucking years and he thinks he’s going to go _mad_ waiting for something which might not — probably won’t — happen. Richie had barely reacted when he’d told him. Eddie had looked at him thinking _why aren’t you angry, why aren’t you jealous, why do you look at me and touch me like that if you don’t want me for yourself, why aren’t I good enough, why won’t you fight for me?_ and hating that he was thinking that. Wanting that. 

Eddie holds up the twenty dollar and raises an eyebrow. “He expects my money to be good here.” With the hint of a laugh. “Bourbon on the rocks and a glass of sweet rosé, please?”

Richie’s irrationally angry that Felix drinks what he does, except in a lame, watered down version. He vows to start drinking gin or something. Maybe whiskey or scotch. “Can I keep it as a tip?” Richie asks, plucking the twenty from his fingers and raising his eyebrows at him. “I’ll let you tuck it into my waistband if you like.” Insensitive because it’s Felix’s cash, after all. Setting out glasses, finding the bottles, taking his sweet time so that Eddie has to be here with him instead of over there with Felix. 

The look he receives is vaguely withering, but Eddie’s still smiling. “I think that only really works if you’re wearing a thong, and I think I would have noticed if I was washing your panties alongside Bev’s.” Dryly, looking over his shoulder at Felix again. “I just kind of figured, we’ve been dating for a month, and it’s not like I can take him home to Sonia. You guys are the closest I have to family, you know? It’s important to me that you approve.” Turning his eyes back to him, big and dark and earnest, thinking _don’t approve. Want me. Want me with you, not him. Hate him. See the similarities and know that I want you. Please._

That rattles him as he catches Eddie’s eyes. For a moment they’re frozen, and then Richie remembers he has drinks to pour. He says “You can see whoever you want, dude, I’m not your mom,” but he doesn’t fucking mean it, oh god. Where’s Bev when you need her?

He pushes the drinks towards him, has forgotten the ice, because he’s poured Eddie rosé and himself a bourbon neat a hundred times before the bar opens or after it closes. He’s talked with him for hours here, some nights when it’s slower and Eddie doesn’t have to be at work the next day. He poured him their drinks — not Eddie’s and Felix’s. He wonders _what would you even do if I said no?_ He says: “I can’t tell much if he’s all the way over there, anyway.”

“I just didn’t think you’d be able to concentrate on a conversation if you were working, that’s all.” Cutting his eyes away and down so Richie doesn’t see the hurt. He had no right to be hurt. Richie doesn’t know what he wants, after all. What he thinks about. Has thought about since he was fucking fifteen, pressing his dick against his pillows and his mouth against the inside of his elbow so his mom wouldn’t hear. 

Eddie rubs his hand over the back of his neck and shrugs. “He’s staying the night, so. I thought— maybe we could all get lunch tomorrow? Then you could get to know him?” Looks at the glasses on the counter and laughs. “Can I get some ice in there too please?”

“Fuck,” Richie says, quickly, and takes the drink back, his ears hot because forgetting the ice is somehow insanely embarrassing. He fixes the drink, hands it over and says “Is Bev— Bev’s going, right?” Because if it’s just going to be him and Eddie and this guy he’s going to have to fake sick. “Sure, lunch. Yeah, sure. Just wake me up if I’m not…”

He’s staying the _night_. Richie swallows, then says “Eddie,” and leans close, wrapping his fingers around the stem of the rosé glass, pinning it to the bar like a butterfly’s wing, chin in his free hand like he’s about to give him a serious talk. “You know, you don’t have to put out, right? Peer pressure is a bitch, baby.”

Eddie says: “yeah, yeah, Bev is coming.” And then Richie is agreeing and saying his name and Eddie fucking freezes with his heart beating out of his chest and— oh. That was stupid. It was stupid of him to hope. Runs his fingers over the condensation on the bowl of the glass and shrugs. “When have you ever known me to do something I really don’t want to do?”

Richie gives him a look, dark-eyed, squints at him once, quickly. He thinks _gazebos_ , but doesn’t say it. And then he shifts his fingers, as if by accident, except index, middle, and ring brush Eddie’s on the glass. It’s a lot to be by mistake. He pushes it and the bourbon on the rocks towards him. “Your date’s getting lonely,” he says, and looks at Felix over Eddie’s shoulder, catches his eyes and raises his brows. Maybe it’s a challenge. _You’ll never know him like I do._

“Have a good night,” he tells Eddie, and then turns away to take an empty glass from someone else, topping it up.

“I’ll do my best.” That flush is back when he takes his glasses, leaves the change with him despite what he’d said, returning to Felix via weaving his way through the dance floor and tables. That look - those eyes, usually laughing, so focused and sharp and on _him_ — and that touch which Eddie is sure was an accident are going to stay with him for years. He’s going to think about the storm behind his eyes when he, inevitably, lets Felix fuck him later.

He slides back into the booth beside him, smiles and accepts the kissed greeting, spends the evening laughing and talking and trying not to look over at the bar. Not to look for Richie. Not to look at him and think _do something do something look at me look at what I’m doing look what I want to do for you_ while Felix presses him into a corner and kisses at his neck, while he’s got his hand on Felix’s thigh, when they finish their drinks together and Felix catches his hand so he doesn’t get up for the next. 

He lets himself look when Felix goes, eyes flicking between them, both beautiful in their own ways but only one of them truly effervescent.

Richie is not watching. He is not watching the way Felix leans into Eddie’s smaller frame. He is not watching the way Eddie tips his head back beneath the mouth on his throat. He is not watching the way Eddie’s hand creeps up Felix’s thigh, and he is not feeling his stomach flip over and over as his eyes flicker up to them again and again. He is not feeling his shoulders tighten until his back literally aches with tension. He is not keeping his hands busy so he can’t see the way they’re shaking.

He’s so busy focusing on keeping busy that he almost doesn’t notice Felix come up to the bar until he turns and he’s there. Richie pulls in a breath because the feeling that comes over him is sort of alien, and he doesn’t know what to do with it. Eyes flash in Eddie’s direction, but he can’t see him beyond the broadness of Felix’s shoulders. He says “Uh—” and then his throat closes up. He reaches up, fixes his glasses: halfway behind his hand “More of the same?” he asks.

“Please. Plus whatever you’re having.” With one of his charming smiles, voice accented towards Boston, leaning into one hip as he gets his wallet out. “I thought I’d better come and introduce myself. I’m Felix. Eddie’s told me a lot about you.” Because Eddie never really shuts up about Richie. It seems to Felix that for every story he tells, Eddie has a Richieism stored away in the back of his mind. It’s not that he’s jealous, because he’s not, because Eddie is waiting for him to come back, but… curious, maybe, about the man who has apparently touched Eddie’s life so deeply that he can’t go a day without mentioning him.

“Yeah, well,” Richie says, “we grew up together,” and it comes out sounding a lot more like ‘he’s like a brother to me’ than perhaps he means it to. “So,” he says, setting new glasses on the bar (doing Felix’s properly this time) eyes flickering up through his frames. Felix has long-fingered hands, dressed well — like Eddie does. Like Eddie _likes_ apparently and Richie takes a moment to consider the fact that even his very best sweater — cashmere, bought for him by Bev last Christmas, already has a hole at the elbow and the hem where he accidentally dropped cigarette ash on it like a goddamn idiot. He’d felt _awful_. “It seems like it’s going well.” 

And maybe he’s fishing. Maybe.

“We’re only a month in, so yeah, I guess as well as it can be for four dates.” Felix laughs, and it looks like a snarl, and he lets the implication hang in the air. He knows that Richie knows he’s staying tonight. He can think what he likes about it. The same way he can think what he likes about the way Felix has all but fucking scented him. The same way Felix knows that only exes and future lovers get talked about the way Eddie talks about Richie, so which is it. 

He raises an eyebrow. “Grew up together, huh? How many awkward teenage Eddie stories do you have because I _know_ he wasn’t always this well put together.”

Richie laughs, too, sharp and sparkling like broken glass. “I mean he’s always been… very Eddie.” And _those are mine_ , Richie thinks. _Those stories are mine and Bev’s and not yours._ He really seriously considers pouring himself a drink, but he doesn’t drink on the job anymore. He finds the mulled cider instead, pours himself a glass and stabs it with a stick of cinnamon. “He’s always been fierce as hell, though” he says, and then: “I trust him to look out for me the way I do for him.” _So watch your fucking back_ , he thinks. “That’s twenty-three even.”

“Yeah, I bet.” Hands over a twenty and a ten and tips him a wink. “Keep the change, yeah pal?” Pockets his wallet and takes the glasses, keeps eye contact as he takes a swig of bourbon and then breaks it when he turns to go back to Eddie. He goes hands first, setting his glass down on the table and sliding that arm along the back of the couch style seating behind Eddie’s neck. Close and intimate to give him his wine, hand tucked in against his bicep as he pulls him in closer.

Catches Richie’s eyes again while Eddie is drinking, and smirks.

 _Pal_ , Richie thinks and _does_ keep the fucking change, thank you very much. He hates people who throw their money around. He’s surprised the guy didn’t haul out a money clip to finger through fifties right in front of him.

Richie meets his eyes and bites down hard on his cheeks so hard he tastes salt. And then he doesn’t look at them again the rest of the night. He really doesn’t. He just knows they’re gone by the time he does last call. He cleans up a little carelessly. Feels caged and unsteady. He wishes Bev were working with him tonight but he thinks she’s out tonight. Probably with Ben, at his place. He takes the stairs up to their apartment, not bothering to be that quiet when he closes the door, not bothering with the chain just in case Bev comes back tonight. He’s already lighting his cigarette as he walks through the dining room, eyes scanning the place for… what? Evidence? 

He’d half-hoped to find his good old _pal_ Felix on the sofa. Maybe he gets whiskey dick, Richie doesn’t know. He hopes he does. He hopes — pushing open the window and slotting himself into the space there to smoke — that Felix is old news come Christmastime, and then he feels like a dick because who wishes that on their best friend. Eddie seems to like him. Likes being touched and kissed and and held by him… wants Richie and Bev to _approve_.

And there’s a rumble of voices from Eddie’s room, the bang of the door closing waking first Felix and then Eddie when the man spoons closer behind him. Eddie thinks _that’s Richie coming in_ as a cold hand slides up his stomach. He thinks _Richie’s on the other side of that door_ when Felix starts to kiss at his ear. He thinks _he doesn’t want me_ while turning in Felix’s arms to kiss him, to press against him, to pull his shirt over his head and let him lathe kisses down his throat and across his collarbone.

 _Fine_ , Eddie thinks, fingers tangled in his hair, groaning against Felix’s tongue, more experienced hands moving them so Eddie can shed more clothes without breaking their mouths apart. _Fine. If you don’t want me I’ll show you what you’re fucking missing_ , and he parts his legs for Felix’s hips.

Ma isn’t here. He has no reason to be quiet when he’s fucked first with fingers, tongue, dick. It’s good, but not _right_. It’s not Richie.

The sounds, at first, Richie can write off. But these walls are thin and eventually what’s happening in Eddie’s room is undeniable. And Richie has the childish impulse to put his hands over his ears and start singing. He’s got a Walkman in his room. He thinks wildly, crushing out his cigarette so fast he burns his fingertips. He closes the window carelessly, goes into his room to get it, clattering through tapes, desperate to drown out the sounds Eddie’s making, before they’re imprinted in his mind forever like his full name, his childhood telephone number. He just decides he’ll take whatever’s in the deck and pulls his headphones on, sitting on his bed, turning the volume up up up until it hurts. But it’s like the goddamn Tell-Tale Heart and _why will you say that I am mad?_ and beat beat beat his own hideous heart in his ears. His fingernails bite into his palms, clutching at his own sheets on either side of his thighs. 

He gets up after a moment, the loudness of the music almost disorienting him. He knocks his shoulder off the doorframe as he leaves his room — genuinely half-considers pounding on the wall to tell them to shut the fuck up (please, _please_ shut up). He considers the couch, considers one of them venturing out to the bathroom and seeing him out there, _knowing_ he couldn’t listen, the wall between his room and Eddie’s so thin. So thin he can hear him touching himself sometimes when— 

He forgets in the morning. Tries to.

He takes off the headphones, hears how loud the tinny music is, and turns it way way down before he taps on Bev’s door, just in case. No answer. And, when he opens it, she is out. He hesitates a second, and then goes inside, shutting it behind him. He can still— Eddie’s little “ahh, ahh,” and his gut _clenches_.

He puts his music on at a more reasonable volume, one where he can’t hear anything else, but isn’t going to go deaf by morning either. He climbs into Bev’s bed — the familiar citrus clove, and something burning bright — cinnamon smell, like cinnamon hearts. Familiar and safe. He presses his face into the pillow and squeezes his eyes shut. He thinks _I hate you, I hate you_ , and he doesn’t know who he means. Maybe himself. He doesn’t cry. He _doesn’t_. But he comes pretty fucking close.

**iv**

“Keep it the _fuck_ down you two!” Slurring slightly, barely ten minutes after Richie has disappeared into her room, Beverly Marsh swans into the apartment with her shoes in her hand. She thinks of Ben kissing her goodnight downstairs after one last nightcap, her feet burn from dancing all night, and by the sounds of things Eddie and Richie have found each other so that’s good. That’s great! No more watching Richie mope around over Eddie and Eddie’s (probably fake, because Felix is a cats name) boyfriend. She’s smiling as she opens the door to her room, drops her shoes on a pile of laundry and clicks on the light and—

 _Pennywise_ her brain says immediately, followed by _Daddy_ and she has to clap a hand over her mouth to stop herself screaming.

But it’s Richie. Just Richie. And Eddie’s not _moaning_ anymore but she can hear the far off thud of the headboard against the wall, the occasional slipped sharpness of flesh on flesh.

“Oh, honey.”

He startles a little when the light flicks on, pulls one headphone off his ear as he half sits up in her bed, Lou Reed still singing _you just keep me hanging on, you just keep me hanging on._

“Sorry, Bev, I just—” He can hear the headboard and he winces, waves a hand vaguely in that direction. Banging, banging as the song reaches it’s crescendo: _It’s such a perfect day, I’m glad I spent it with you…_

He thinks he should ask her if she wants him to go, but can’t quite get the words out.

Something around her eyes tightens. Regret. Sympathy. The need to protect. She shuts her door with a snap and shakes her head until the auburn waves bounce. 

“Budge over. Give me that.” Takes the Walkman from him and slots the tape into her stereo, turning it up just enough to drown them out. Gives him a quick once over, then shrugs, pulls off her dress and her stockings in two movements and pads to her dresser for her pyjamas. “Do you need comfies?”

He’s sort of stunned by how Bev can just come in and fix things — something Bill can do it, too, but not like her. He huddles back against the wall, knees to his chest and says “I need to go deaf,” because that’s innocuous enough, and he tries not to think that it’s still happening, it’s still—

And everything will be different now, and is this the first time Eddie’s ever—?

Could he have changed things? Could he have said something at the dinner table, that night? And what if he had and Eddie had just… _Yeah, right, not you, Trashmouth._

Bev scowls at him, but it’s short lived, all freckles and sunburned nose as she clambers onto the bed to sit beside him. To wrap an arm around his pyramid knees and lean her head against the bones.

“I’m sorry, Richie.” Because what else can you say when your best friend in the whole world is getting his heart broken in sections by squeaking bedsprings and the rattle of wood on drywall? She presses her mouth against his kneecap and closes her eyes. “If you want me to call Ben we can have a threesome in retaliation.”

It’s too much, her comfort and he’s clenching his jaw until she says that thing about the threesome and he laughs out loud, too loud as always. When he cracks apart, though, when he breaks down, it’s silently. It happens so fast that he can’t stop it, and says startled, wet “oh,” and then wraps both arms around his face, forearms pressed to his glasses, dropping back against the wall as his chest shudders. “Fuck,” he whispers.

The thing is, she’s seen Eddie cry like this too. When Richie has flirted with a girl in the bar, when he’s disappeared off into the bathroom to do a line or two, the night they had to call an ambulance because he started drinking on the job and ended up with alcohol poisoning. She wraps her arms around him tighter, presses until her lips part and it’s just teeth against him through a layer of clothing, and lets him cry.

There’s nothing she can do. If she tells Richie about Eddie’s feelings for him now it will read as pity, will rub salt into a wound already gaping and sore. All she can do is allow this. Let him feel the pain and let him acknowledge that this runs deeper than friendship, than wanting, because she thinks maybe he knows but never thinks about it, and Eddie resigned himself a long time ago to the fact that he’ll never be the one to have Richie the way that he wants. That Richie will love bigger and brighter than him, because he doesn’t see himself the way they do. 

But nor does Richie. Richie has always been too busy in the pit of despair. Has always hated himself for one thing or another and assumed she wouldn’t see - hating his brashness, his inability to keep his mouth shut, his glasses, his overbite, his body when puberty hit, his sexuality. He just hates and hates and only spares love for the people outside of his own skin. So maybe it’s fine that she doesn’t know what to say, or do, except hold him together at his seams.

He cries like a kid, and it's gross and snotty and _jesus_ , he thinks, _I’m disgusting_ , but it’s just Bev. Thank God it’s Bev. And when he’s done, when it’s finally over and he’s left with those stupid, shuddering breaths he hasn’t had since he was little. He wipes his nose on his sleeve, wipes his cheeks. His glasses are salt-streaked, and he takes them off, reaching out to Bev with his free hand to tangle his fingers in her hair.

“You can’t say anything,” he whispers, when his voice is as steady as he can make it. “Please. Bev.”

“Believe me, your secret is safe with me.” Murmured back, turning her head to look up at him, eyes clear and green and calm. “Do you want to tell me about it? You might feel better.” Sometimes she thinks she collects secrets. She knows all the things that drive Eddie crazy when he looks at Richie, knows all the little details about the tiny things he’s said and done to make Eddie _hope_ , because Eddie remembers every single one like an encyclopaedia of facts about Richie and only Richie. He remembers them like he remembers how to bandage wounds, what to use on burns, how to neutralize it when chemicals have spilled on their skins.

Would Richie be crying now, if he knew? If he knew how closely Eddie watches, how much he files away, because he’s so terrified of losing him that he’s convinced himself that one day memories will be all he has left?

She hates that fucking clown.

He takes a deep breath, wipes his eyes again, and thinks about telling her. Thinks about telling her that he’s been in love with Eddie since he can remember even having feelings like that. That all Eddie has to do is walk into a room sometimes, to make Richie catch his breath. That getting him to smile sometimes feeling like winning the goddamn lottery. He could tell her that Eddie makes him feel, sometimes, like he has to tear off his own fucking skin, and he doesn’t know why. That the girls he kisses have big, brown eyes — unguarded eyes — like baby fawns left in a cemetery, which is an apt fucking metaphor, because his feelings for those girls are dead in the water anyway.

He thinks about telling her how sleeping with them makes him feel less human, and then he feels like shit afterwards and probably makes them feel like shit, and they definitely don’t find him funny, after that so he’s essentially failed at being useful at all. He thinks about telling her how he’s imagined what Eddie’s mouth tastes like since he was barely a teenager. Thinks about it when they eat watermelon or drink iced coffee, or Eddie drinks his sweet rosé. Richie fucking hates sweet rosé so goddamn much, but he would pay _money_ to taste it on Eddie’s mouth. 

“I mean, who the fuck is that guy?” he says, hearing his voice creak. He wonders if it would hurt less if it was a girl, and thinks _yes it would_. Because then there would be no hope, because Eddie would be straight and it would never ever happen even _if_. “He called me ‘pal,’ I want to kill him.”

“I think I’d feel the same if anyone put their hands on Ben.” Soothing, thumb rubbing over his thigh as she watches him. “It’s okay, Richie.” And it isn’t, but it will be. It can be. Everyone gets their heart broken at least once in their lives, and most people survive. “He’s just some— I don’t know, Eddie said he met him at work.”

I _t won’t last_ , she wants to say, _Eddie wants you._

“I bet he drives a Land Rover,” Richie says, and thinks _gorgeous but messy_ and wonders if _that’s_ what Eddie likes, and feels like he really only meets one of those criteria and not the good one. He’s more just… disastrous and disgusting. He sniffles. And he thinks about what she’s said about Ben and _knows_ that she knows.

And he still can’t say it.

Jesus, he doesn’t fucking _deserve_ Eddie. Eddie deserves someone who will live him out loud. Out in the open. In a thousand ways Richie can’t. “Hey, but, did you mean that about you and Ben, ‘cause if I’m still single when I turn thirty, can I really be in a relationship with guys?”

“If some little thing with big brown eyes hasn’t snapped you up within the next eight years, I will renounce Ben and marry you. And then go and fuck Ben when you’re not looking.” And then, quietly; “Eddie said it was a fucking Porsche. He was so mad about it. He hates posh cars.” Because he does. Thinks that they’re an insult to the point of automobiles. They’re not helpful, not built for any reason save for speed and gaucheness. 

She lifts her head to rest her chin on his knees.

He laughs softly, runs his fingers through her hair again. Sometimes he wishes he could be in love with Bev because she’s just the fucking best, and she’s beautiful and fierce and clever. He thinks _I hate this._ He thinks _He won’t, he won’t pick me._ He says “He can’t hate them that much,” and it sounds bitter. Tastes bitter in his mouth. And it sounds like he’s blaming Eddie and he doesn’t _want_ to. He thinks about saying _I’m tired, Bev_. Tired of hiding the way he is, the way he feels for Eddie, the way he fucking _wants_ and _wants_ so much it feels like it’s going to eat him from the inside out.

“He does.” She says, and there’s double meaning in it. He hates the cars and what they stand for. “He thinks cars like that are too far removed from what consumers actually want, and need. He said they’re _gauche_ and _cold_.” Fixes him with a look, and then drops it. Moves around him to collapse against the pillows and sigh. “Maybe you should look for a boyfriend, Rich. I’ll go with you, I’m an excellent wingwoman.”

“I don’t want a boyfriend, Bev,” he says and then follows her down. And he doesn’t, not… he doesn’t. He doesn’t _want_ to want a boyfriend, and that’s the same thing. Eddie is different, because Eddie is Eddie. He puts his glasses on the windowsill. “I’m not…” What? Gay? Loveable? He stares at the ceiling, one leg bent towards it. “I don’t think I’m… good,” he says. “There’s something wrong with me, I’m like… I’d be like… quicksand. In The Never-Ending Story, you know, just— like, taking and taking… until there’s nothing left. Adjectives: Suffocating. Dark. Kinda slimy.”

Bev has to bite down against the _Eddie says_ in her reply, shifts again to get up and turn the light off as she speaks. “You’re beautiful. Just because you don’t see it doesn’t mean no one else does.” The tape clicks to an end, and she lifts the covers for them both to climb over. Thinks about other things Eddie has said, and the never ending story, and twines their fingers together. “Good strong hands. Eyes so dark you can see constellations in them. Jawline that just goes on and on and on.” Rubs her thumb over the back of his hand. “ _Your lips make up for your crooked eye / Your touch so sweet, I'm not going to lie._ ”

Because Eddie had said that. Recited it breathlessly at her after one pull too many on a joint. Eyes on richies door the whole time. _He loves you_ , she wants to say, and doesn’t, because someone is padding by her door to go to the bathroom and she doesn’t want them to hear. 

  
Richie sighs when he hears whoever it is walk by, reaches up to push his free hand through his hair like relief. Like pain lessening. Inhaling fully for the first time in what feels like the entire evening. “Aw, man, I thought my glasses hid that,” he jokes, and then “Careful, Bevvie, I’ll fall in love with you,” he says. He says it in a stupid, movie-star Voice. He squeezes her fingers and thinks that those are all surface things. That maybe even Beverly doesn’t know what he’s really like on the inside. Maybe he really is good enough at hiding it. He stretches his legs out beneath the covers, arches his spine until it cracks, then turns to face her, pulling his legs up until his knees knock her shins. “Sorry if I killed your buzz, or whatever. How was _Ben_?”

“The boy cannot dance, I’ll tell you that much for nothing.” As she turns too, wriggles her fingers under his cheek to hold onto his face, brings his other hand up to kiss his knuckles. “You’re gonna have to show him how to do those moves from Pulp Fiction. I can’t even get him to do the fucking twist right.” And then she curls right into him, head under his chin to breathe him in, and she wants to tell him so badly her stomach hurts.

But it’s not her secret to tell.

**v**

He doesn’t bring it up again. Not to Eddie, not to Beverly, even though he knows she would listen. He reschedules his days — showers as soon as he gets in, when he knows Felix is there. Showers where he uses up all the hot water because it will be hot enough when the others gets up to go to work in the morning. The rushing of water in his ears helps him to drown out the rest. Sometimes he hears them, sliding his glasses back on over his ears as he meets his eyes in the mirror to the rhythmic sound of the headboard hitting the wall. Sometimes he thinks about going into Eddie’s room when no one’s around and just dragging the bed away from the wall an inch or two. Or maybe he’s drag it to the centre of the room and rip all of the covers off of it (and burn then).

He doesn’t.

If they’re still at it, that’s when he goes out to the living room with his cigarettes and smokes on the sofa with his walkman on and a notebook in front of him, without giving a _fuck_ about nicotine stains on the walls

It’s almost a full month later, and he sleeps less, but his mind is still holding, and his heart’s still in one piece. Sometimes the tiredness helps — running the bar with a few more mistakes than usual, but a nice kind of tired numbness, one that makes it easier for him not to care about the sounds he sometimes hears at night, or the way he sometimes has to pour Felix drinks, and the way he wants to hawk a loogie into them so badly he can feel it in his throat.

Tonight is a Felix night, and he and Eddie are tucked into their usual corner booth, and Richie is determinedly Not Looking until—

“Can I get an ashtray?” and that voice makes Richie’s blood run cold, even though his fingers are already reaching for a clean one. He looks up and meets those weird, pale eyes.

Richie’s mind is screaming _holy shit_ because it’s not _un_ common to see people they know in here from time to time — people they went to school with — but it’s uncommon to see one of Bowers’s gang. It’s like he’s twelve all over again, heart racing with fear, thinking _shit, have to warn the others_ like they’re going to have to fucking book it, simultaneously thinking _don’t give the others away_ so he doesn’t glance in Eddie’s direction to see if he’s noticed that Patrick fucking Hockstetter is here in this bar.

Richie sort of tosses the ashtray at him and reminds himself that he is twenty-two years old and past this shit, so he has to nut up and _nothing_ is going to happen, because jesus, it can’t. There’s people everywhere, and a lot of them are regulars. He’s fine, it’s fine. Richie’s eyes flicker over him. “Want something to drink?” he asks, and swallows down the _asshole_ and is inordinately proud of himself.

“A Guinness,” Hockstetter says, and when Richie reaches for the tap he says “In a bottle. And then “no glass,” when Richie gets that, too. He opens it for him and Patrick takes the bottle by the neck like a weapon, just for a second, like he might smash it on the bar and then right into Richie’s face and Richie wonders if the acetate in his glasses will be strong enough to withstand that particular assault. Maybe they will protect him for once instead of just getting broken.

It’s over quickly. Patrick takes the bottle like a normal human being, settles his weird, long-limbed self on the bar stool and smiles at Richie in a way that would be normal if it was from anyone else. Richie finds something else to do.

Something else takes him back to looking at Felix and Eddie. _Eddie and Felix_ , like they’re one fucking entity, and he doesn’t want to do that either but it’s like being caught between a rock and a hard place. Like being caught between Bowers calling him a fairy and the rest of Derry knowing. He has the choice of hovering around Patrick fucking Hockstetter with his lighter and his aerosol, Patrick fucking Hockstetter who was somehow worse than Henry Bowers, or watching Eddie giggling into his wine glass while Felix slots a hand around the back of his neck and shakes him affectionately.

Either way it makes him fucking nauseous through the exhaustion. It’s not fucking _fair_. Maybe that’s the root of it. Felix could have anyone he fucking wanted. He has the money. He has the fucking self possession. He has everything Richie doesn’t and he’s fucking gone after his best fucking friend like it’s nothing. Like it’s not ripping his heart out every second.

He adjusts his glasses and blows his hair out of his eyes and doesn’t know what to do, which is typical of the whole rock and a hard place situation. Scrubs hard at a sticky patch of spilled beer on the counter, gaze flicking up just in time to watch them kiss. Fuck.

Patrick Hockstetter is watching Richie Tozier like a hawk, like a predator in the grass. If you just keep so, so still, nothing sees you, nothing looks. He barely even blinks. He thinks about how snakes don’t need to blink because they don’t have eyelids. How snakes aren’t actually slimy at all, and can be both so slow and so quick. He thinks about how humans have eyelids, and how the inner corner of your eye holds the plica semilunaris which used to be a third, obliterated by evolution. He wonders how a third eyelid would change the appearance of human eyes, like would it make them grey and cloudy or—

He watches Tozier’s eyes flicker up and away, fast. So fast, like he’s put his hand on the burner of a stove while it’s still hot. Patrick dared Belch Huggins to do that once, and he did, and then Patrick had held his hand there, but only for a _second_. He had a scar like a solar eclipse at the base of his hand. Patrick thought it was sort of beautiful, or maybe would be, if it wasn’t Belch’s hand, and Belch wasn’t dead.

He follows Richie’s eyes and — oh, it’s not little Aspirator Kaspbrak. Still small and delicate enough enough to fit in his pencil box with all the mummified flies, he thinks. He curls his fingers into a loose fist and thinks about the waxpaper feel of wings, only a hundred, a thousand times thinner and more fragile. Sometimes he thinks about making windows out of fly-wings, and how the world would look if he could. 

And he looks back at Tozier who he always _knew_ was a filthy little fairy and thinks _I’ve already caught you. I pinned you for one years ago._ All it’s going to take now is that one little nudge over the edge, He thinks. Tozier’s probably _gagging_ for it, always had his hands all over his little faggot friends. _Lonely_ , thinks Patrick. _Easy as taking the breath from a little tiny baby._

Richie can see him looking, kind of. It’s in his periphery, beyond the scope of his glasses, and Hockstetter is so pale and thin that with the blur overlayed he kind of looks like he’s from a horror movie. Like he’s Michael Myers. He _belongs_ in a horror movie. Richie grits his teeth and scrubs harder, doesn’t look into Hockstetter’s face because who the fuck knows what he’ll actually see there, head whipping up when he hears Eddie shout something unintelligible. Sees the bone white clench of fingers around Eddie’s wrist, where he _knows_ he has freckles, but Eddie is laughing wildly so it can’t be— the sudden anger he feels is unreasonable. Felix looks like a hyena when he laughs, Richie has to physically stop himself imagining bloodied muzzles and then the comparison is easy to draw - Hockstetter and Felix both have that vague rangy scavenger feel to them. The way they move. The way they speak. The way he’s heard Felix growling Eddie’s name through the wall between slams of his bed.

He shakes his head and allows himself, for the briefest moment, to press his fingertips to his eyes because if he doesn’t he thinks his head might split open and then there’d be viscera and horrible stinking _queer_ thoughts all over the bar.

“Do you need an Aspirin?” Hockstetter asks, voice almost soft. “Or something stronger.” He raises his eyebrows, because he has that, too. “Wouldn’t ask,” he says “if I didn’t _know_ you.” Because he does know him. He knows all about little Richie Tozier with his punchable face, and his broken glasses held together with tape, and the way he goes sort of wall-eyed when they’re snatched off his face. Ugly motherfucker, he thinks. But in a weird sort of fascinated way, because he’s grown up, hasn’t he? He looks less like a frog than he did as a kid. It shouldn’t be hard, Patrick thinks again, to get him where he wants him.

 _You don’t know me_ , Richie thinks, but he takes his hand away from his face and cleans his glasses with his counter rag and fumbles with the arms so that he can buy time because what the fuck. What the fuck. This is some trick, has to be, has to be a fucking plan to get him close enough to pull over the counter and punch him until the bridge of his glasses snap. He claws for a joke, a snap in his voice instead of on his face, scrambles at the falling rocks of _don’t touch Eddie like that_ and _what the fuck_ and _I want to touch Eddie like that_ before he can reset his spectacles and shoot him a look. A smile, half wry, half terrified. “If I didn’t know _you_ , then I’d probably take you up on that offer.”

Patrick laughs and shrugs his shoulders like it doesn’t matter, eyes flickering between Tozier’s for a moment before he cocks his head at him. “New friend?” he asks, gaze flickering to Eddie and Felix in the corner. _I see him. You and your little friends can run but you can’t hide._ “He doesn’t seem like he’d be one of yours.” Too much money for one thing, too much class. And not nearly as soft, he thinks.

Richie mimics his shrug like that doesn’t make terror pound through him in hoof beats. Doesn’t make his chest tight like straight jackets and leather, doesn’t make his wisdom teeth go numb in horror. Eddie is scared of Patrick. Was always, always scared of Patrick. He could have laughed in Bowers’s face and spat in Belch’s but Patrick always sent him trembling.

 _‘Ma says he killed his baby brother.’_ Whispered at sleepovers, his bottom lip trembling, feeling for a child he didn’t know. Richie had laughed, back then, and told him that Sonia just read too many true crime books.

He regrets that now. 

“Not one of mine, but that’s Eds for you.” Because what the fuck else can he say without outing Eddie? Without drawing attention to the tawny skin exposed where he’s cuffed his slacks above his loafers, or the fact that he’s wearing _fucking loafers_ like there aren’t men like Patrick who hate him purely for what he likes in bed?

Patrick watches Eddie and Felix for a moment, the way Felix holds his wrist like a snare. And Eddie Kaspbrak has always looked, Patrick thinks, like a rabbit caught in a trap. “That guy,” he says, looking back at Richie as he slides his fingers in a loose fist over the neck of his empty beer one by one by one, “Felix. I would’ve thought your gang would all be eager to keep him away from your own. Or is it that he squeezes those little bleeding hearts you all’ve got?” _I know him. Can’t you see he’s dangerous?_ “Poor Kaspbrak,” he says, with a soft laugh, looking over at them again, all cozied up together. It makes his stomach hurt.

“The fuck does _that_ mean?” The fear narrowing down to a spike, a claw, a fence post, a pocket knife under his ribs. Richie forces himself not to readjust his glasses again, not to look over at Eddie and _Felix_ to look for any tell-tale (hearts) signs that Felix is more, or less, than what he says he is. What Eddie says he is. Besides; “Eddie’s a grown man. He can do what he wants. The fuck do you mean _poor Kaspbrak_?”

“Settle down, Tozier, I don’t care at all what he’s _doing_. Or who.” He slides his beer across the counter, lights another cigarette, looking up as the lighter illuminates his eyes. “He’s just bad news, is all. Going the same way Bowers went.” And he folds his arms across his chest like a straight-jacket. “If you know what I mean.” He holds the pack out to Richie.

“Shut the fuck up,” Richie says, braver than he feels, his guts shaking in his skin. He takes the cigarette and taps it on he bar, squinting at him. It makes no sense. The juxtaposition of Felix in a suit sipping his _fucking_ bourbon, his hand on Eddie’s hip below the table of the booth, and what Hockstetter is saying make no sense. There’s no way to correlate them into something whole “How the hell do you know him, anyway?”

“From around. Sometimes we run in the same circles,” he tells him, because that’s probably enough to get Tozier nervous. “Kaspbrak won’t be the first kitten Felix has tortured, let’s put it that way.” He drags on his cigarette, eyes narrowed against the smoke. He glances their way again and says “You know, he kind of looks like you. Only less—” waves a hand over Richie’s general form. “Messed up.”

“The fuck.” But he kind of half swallows it because suddenly his throat is so tight he surprised he can breathe. Now richies the one who needs an aspiration, who’d have thunk? He remembers the vague mint taste of Eddie’s, how he’d been desperate to just put his mouth anywhere his had been, takes half a step back to make sure Hockstetter can’t get at him over the bar and squints at him. “I think you’re the one going the same way as fucking Bowers, man, what the fuck? He looks nothing like me. And— and Eddie can take care of himself.” He’s made that much very clear. But the implication the guy is making— _run in the same circles_. What does that mean? He arches an eyebrow at him, mouth a thin line.

“Takes one to know one,” Patrick says. Maybe about being crazy like Bowers, maybe about something else. Something a little closer to home. He lets his eyes slide over Richie anyway, taking him in, taking his time. “I bet you wish he couldn’t take care of himself, don’t you? So you could swoop in, save the day. You’re bigger than Felix is,” he muses, traces a long finger from one of his own narrow shoulders to the other like a benediction, showing Richie where he’s broader. _The father, the son, and the holy spirit._ “Hm. And then I bet little Kaspbrak would look up at you with those _big_ brown eyes…”

For a moment, Richie’s stuck. Because yeah, okay, fuck him, that is what he wants and that is what he’s thought of, and he feels like a terrible fucking friend every time he does, so fuck Hockstetter too; but also because _how the fuck would you know anything about it?_

Richie’s just glad he’s not holding anything, because his fingers and palms jerk reflectively to let go and then come back into fists. His back teeth hurt where he’s grinding them together so hard “Fuck you, dude.” Low, an undertow to tidal pools and then further to drowning. “You don’t know the first fucking thing about me.” Except… does he? In another life where Richie was comfortable, would they _run in the same circles?_ “Or Eds.” 

Felix, he thinks, can go blow a fat one and then stick it up his ass for all he cares.

  
Patrick laughs like he’s totally unbothered, because he can see the cracks forming. “Are you _jealous_ , Tozier? I mean, you must be, you’ve been making calf-eyes at _Eds_ all night. What happened to that obnoxious mouth of yours? Why don’t you just say something?” He wets his lower lip. “You want me to?” He shifts to slip off the bar stool, body long and lean — snake-like.

Richie thinks he’s having another out of body experience, watching himself as his arm shoots out to grab Hockstetter’s wrist, because the last thing he wants is to send Eddie into a panic attack when he’s not the only one around to comfort him. That’s a fucking disgusting image. Eddie tearstreaked and clinging to Felix, Felix holding his inhaler to his mouth, Felix running soothing hands through his hair and shushing him and kissing his temple and _turning his face away_ from the things that scare him. That’s richies fucking job. That’s where Richie should be. “I’m not jealous and I’m not making fucking calf-eyes. I’m— I’m _surveying the fucking area_ , you know, because that’s my job?”

Patrick reaches out calmly and puts out his cigarette, and then places those fingers against Richie’s forearm, holding him there while he pulls his wrist from his grip. “You look jealous,” he says, meeting his eyes. He lets his fingers slide over the thin skin of his forearm, over veins, then draws back before anyone can see them. It’s just long enough. “Simmer down, Tozier, you look like you’re about to spill over. I won’t say anything.” He looks over at Felix and Eddie again. Who are touching in a way Richie and Patrick don’t. “I don’t kiss and tell.” 

Part of him wants to draw back. The other part of him, the sleeping insidious part which he hates and only stirs around _Eddie_ , uncoils just a little at his touch. 

And he hates that. He hates that a simple touch is enough to have his stomach rolling — because it’s not Eddie, and because it’s a _man_. A man who won’t want to be his boyfriend, because he still doesn’t want _that_ unless it’s Eddie. “Yeah you’re a true gentleman, I’m really convinced.”

“I never said I was a gentleman,” Patrick tells him, pushing his fingers through long dark hair before he taps the bar with one finger, twice. “But neither are you.” And then he does slide off the bar stool. “See you around, Tozier.”

Richie kind of half raises a hand at him, throat clenching when he swallows, because oh god what the fuck. He’s just had what would maybe pass as a civil conversation with Patrick fucking Hockstetter. About Eddie. About what Eddie is going with Felix. About Felix being unhinged the same way Bowers and fucking fucking Hockstetter are. He runs a hand through his hair and watches from the corner of his eye as he leaves, then turns his gaze and watches Felix pulling Eddie half into his lap to snap his teeth at his chin and thinks—

Yeah. He can see that.

People filter out in pairs and threes and by themselves and then it’s just Richie. He’d watched, torturing himself maybe, Felix lead Eddie upstairs an hour or so ago. He doesn’t want to go up there. He thinks he’d probably do anything to avoid that. So he cleans the bar twice and rebags trash so it doesn’t leak over his shoes when he takes it out back and then—

He remembers the cigarette Hockstetter had given him, lights it, leans back against the wall and resists the urge once again to cover his ears because even from down here he can hear what sounds like Eddie saying _fuck, fuck_ but could just be his own mind playing cruel tricks on him.

From the shadows at the end of the alley, there’s the flick flick of a lighter and Patrick Hockstetter emerges from the shadows like an urban cryptid, unfolding himself from the wall he was leaning against and closing in on Richie. He flicks his lighter once more, but it’s out. Maybe because he’s been burning it out here for the better part of an hour, setting little, meaningless things on fire. He tosses it away, where it skitters over darkened pavement. “Got a light, then?” he asks. Like it’s totally normal to be lingering in side alleys. “You must be tired after a shift like that,” he says, cigarette between his lips. “I didn’t see your new friend go home.”

“Holy—” Richie jumps so hard he drops his cigarette, fumbles, and burns his palm catching it again to bring it back to his lips, to let the smoke curl around his racing heart. “— fuck, don’t creep up on me like that, man, shit.” Shakes the singe out of his hand, looks up and then behind him at the building.

He knows Eddie’s window like he knows how to get home. And no, that is definitely Eddie whining and begging and—. He squeezes his eyes shut while his face is still upturned, lets the smoke leave his lips in a long white tendril when he finally looks back at the monster in the shadows.

“He’s staying over. And he’s not my friend.”

Patrick laughs under his breath, shoulders shaking as he steps closer. “He’s not my friend, either,” he says, eyes falling to Richie’s mouth, following the smoke upwards towards that soft, rhythmic pleading. “Oh, is _that_ why you’re lingering out here?” he asks, lowering his voice almost conspiratorially. He smiles as him as he stops, about a foot away. Tozier is still afraid of him. And still not quite as tall. “Does that get you all worked up?”

“What the fuck is wrong with you?” Squinting through the haze, mouth downturned, and he half means himself and he half means Patrick, and the bottom of his shoe sort of scrapes the wall when he tries to step away and ends up pressed back against it. Because some deep, deep, abysmal thing in him says _yes_ in a small voice and he hates it. He’s tried not to listen. Tried to drown it out. Because it’s easy to imagine Eddie pushing his mouth to his ear and making those noises.

And he never will.

So it’s better to smother that scary fucking demon in him that awoke when Pennywise did, that evil twisted thing that wants Eddie. Because that’s what it is. That’s what being a fucking _fairy_ is, right? If it weren’t there wouldn’t be so much hatred in the word. Richie considers him, eyebrows pulled together, licking over his teeth as he bites out; “You’ve been out here longer than me, dude, is it getting _you_ off? Because I know Bowers had some choice words for that.”

“I was waiting for Felix,” he says, and maybe it’s the truth and maybe not. He shrugs it off, unimportant. “But I guess he’s _busy_. Are you going to light my cigarette for me, or not?” He puts it between his lips and leans close. Close enough that he braces one hand against the wall beside Richie’s head. He remembers the darkness in Tozier’s eyes in the bar when he’d touched his arm. He’s been learning what it looks like when people start to let go of reason. Sometimes it’s fun just to see how hard he can push, or how easy it is to break through. Some people come apart like wet paper, some people are a little bit tougher. But this boy, he thinks, is hungry. 

There’s a flicker of pain in Richie’s eyes. Yeah. Felix is busy. And so is Eddie. And he misses the nights he could just go upstairs and find him reading a book or sneaking out of richies room with his Walkman and tapes in his hands and—

He lights the cigarette off of the end of his own, and doesn’t know why he does it. Like Patrick he’s thinking back to the bar, to that touch on his arm, and oh god if it can’t be Eddie then who should it be? What man would have him and understand that he still _loves_ , just not _him_? Patrick is dangerous but he’s still safer than a stranger. Still safer than actually putting himself out there.

“So what, you’re going to wait out here all night and get yourself off to your not-friend fucking—” He can’t finish. “—listening to Felix?”

“Can _you_ hear Felix over that?” Patrick asks, leaning ever so slightly closer, exhaling smoke without turning his head away. ‘That’ is the headboard, and Eddie’s rhythmic little sound, breath tight. When he takes his cigarette out of his mouth it passes dangerously close to Richie’s jawline. “I guess being blind as a bat really does make your other senses stronger.” He flicks him in the nose of the glasses and laughs that weird breathy khkhkh, as some embers float off into the night. “Think he gets louder, Tozier?”

The flinch is instinctive, a sense memory of frames snapped, and Richie blinks rapidly as he glares up at him. There’s the trace of heat along his jaw, and he tilts away from it. “Don’t have a clue, man, sorry.” Protecting himself and Eddie at the same time, squirming so that he can smoke his cigarette. “Just assumed that you’d already have an idea of way Felix sounds like, since he’s not your _friend_ but you seem very _invested_ in him.”

Patrick smiles like a snake (like a clown), corners of his mouth uncannily wide. He ignores that little dig, it can’t touch him anyway. He hasn’t been touched in a long time — not inside. “I bet you think _you_ could make him louder. Big man like you. Big shoulders… Big mouth…” Looks him up and down as he closes the distance, barely an inch between them anymore. “What else you got, Tozier?”

“Nothing, obviously, otherwise it wouldn’t be Felix up there would it?” Snapped before he can stop it, the back of his head cold against brick where he’s still trying to get away but can’t. And then regret, because fuck _fuck fuck_ he shouldn’t have said that. Because he can’t get away from that either. 

Richie often suspects that his mouth hates him, that it shoots off before he’s had a chance to think shit through, and this is no exception. His mouth knows his shame better than it knows to hide, and Hockstetter (he has to stop thinking of him as _Patrick_ , has to stop thinking about how it humanizes him, because no psycho is called _Patrick_ and that’s what Hockstetter is) is leaning in so close he feels like a mouse in a trap with his leg cleaved in two.

Fractured like Eddie’s arm was.

 _Got you_ Patrick’s mind singsongs. “Oh, I don’t know,” he muses, and he lays his hand, cigarette still between his fingers, against Richie’s jaw. “There is something. Similar.” He reaches up and digs his fingers into Richie’s curls, tongue wetting his lower lip. The cigarette burns dangerously close to those strands. “Dark curly hair. That jawline. He likes tall men, Eddie. With Billy and Stanny and Richie. Always looking up to all of you. Maybe if you nixed the glasses he might see you, Tozier. Men like that, they like clean lines.” He pulls his fingers free from Richie’s hair and jerks at the hem of his shirt. “Maybe you could clean yourself up.” And his fingers linger there, not holding the fabric, not touching him through it, but close. So close.

“ _Fuck_ you.” But it comes out strained, reaching out to grab his wrist and squeeze, eyes slits. “Man, fuck you. I guess it’s true what they say about bullies, huh? You never stop being one and you’re always fucking overcompensating for something.” Because his brain is fucking flatlining. He has no idea what to say to any of that. No idea what to do to crush the comparison down. 

Eddie always looks up. Because he’s Eddie. He wouldn’t be Eddie without that little tilt of his chin, the determination, the half smile in summer sun begging for trouble because Mrs. K never let him get into that. “You can’t just— because he’s short— Thats not his fucking fault is it?”

Hockstetter laughs that weird laugh again, clicking away in his throat. “You want to show me where you want my hand, Tozier?” he asks, fingers loose, still caught in Richie’s grip. He drops the cigarette to the ground. “I’ll let you listen to him, upstairs. C’mon, who’m I going to tell? All my friends are dead.”

Richie jerks his hand away like he’s been burned, mouth opening and closing and opening and closing because _what. The fuck. What the fuck what the fuck._ “What the fuck, Hockstetter?” Finds his voice but it’s crackling and scratchy like the end of a record, flushing over his nose and cheeks, attempting to wet his lips but finding his tongue dry. Men don’t talk to him like this. Men don’t want him. Patrick is fucking with him. He has to be fucking with him. Because men— men—

_Men like him like clean lines._

“Shhh, you want him to hear you? Down here, with me?” he asks. “Or maybe that would burn him a little. Maybe he’d be a little bit jealous. Sneaking looks at you from that booth in the corner, instead of pouring all that love and attention into Felix. Don’t you want him to wonder where you go? What you get up to? Where you get touched, when no one’s looking?” Quick as lightning, his hand slips beneath Richie’s shirt, fingertips tracing the very edge of a hipbone. He inhales through his nose.

“No.” Gritted through his teeth, quiet, half chewing the inside of his cheek as his eyes flicker in the vague direction of Eddie saying _Felix!_ and the thwack of the headboard getting faster. He has to close them. And then all he can feel is the touch Hockstetter is giving him, his cold fingers, and he feels like he might choke.

It’s not Eddie. It’s not Eddie touching him like this. He wants it to be Eddie. And he wants what Patrick — _Hockstetter_ — is saying, god. He wants Eddie to watch him the way Eddie has made _him_ watch. Wants him to wonder, wants him to burn with jealousy the way he has been every night but— but— it’s just a fantasy. It’s just a fantasy because Eddie doesn’t want him and never would because he’s not clean. In any sense of the word, and his mother was right to warn him against the boys like him and the girls like Bev who weren’t Bev.

The breath that leaves him is wet and clotted, head leaning back against the wall, blinking hard up at the moon.

“Oh, man, that could be your name,” Patrick says, very soft, leaning into him, until his lips are right against his ear. “In his pretty mouth. Maybe if he knew you were slipping away to filthy places to do filthy things he’d be thinking your name while he’s up there, opening himself up to Felix. Maybe he wants to get a little _dirty_. Huh,” he says, a laugh low in his throat as he gets his hand far enough beneath Richie’s shirt to spread his spidery fingers over his stomach, which feels hot after the cool fall air. “Maybe that would awaken something in him. He’d start getting sick of all that clean, missionary sex he’s getting.”

“Don’t. Don’t talk about him like that.” It makes him think of Eddie coming home from work, covered in motor oil and grit and sweat, like he’s fucked out from a long day of working with his hands. Richie grits his teeth, tries not to think about it and thinks about it anyway. Like it’s fizzing under his fucking skin, all that want, and because his piece of shit brain has the _tone_ now he can _hear_ what it would be like if Eddie was crying his name like that. 

Richie remembers in a flash some fucking lecture he’d caught years ago, about everyone having two brains, about them being connected by this central… central _thing_ and he understands that. One side of his brain has his body reacting, has his dick twitching, while the other half is screaming and thrashing against it. 

Above them, Eddie’s voice rises to a crescendo and then falls again. Rises. Falls. Rises. Falls. Slower than Richie is breathing because he’s fucking _panting_ now. Panting over the thought of him, over Hockstetter touching him.

Patrick falls silent because Eddie’s doing the work for him, now, and his eyes narrow just a little as he slides his hand up over Richie’s ribs, more solid than he thought. He’s so close now that his forearm is pressed to the wall beside Richie’s head, leather and metal scratching softly against the brick. He wonders if Felix is fucking him slowly. He wonders if Tozier would even be able to hold back, if he ever got the chance. He slides his hand down, fingertips digging into his skin before pressing his cupped hand hard, over the front of his jeans. Grins, because he can feel him stiffening, and before he can be told ‘yes’ or ‘no’ he starts replicating the rhythm Eddie’s voice indicates, floating to them from the window above.

Richie moans, sharp and quiet like burning coals, doesn’t look at him but stays trained on the sky. He doesn’t want to see Hockstetter’s face. Doesn’t want to know what he’s thinking about, him bucking hard up into the pressure, or the noises Eddie is making, or the way that he stops fucking breathing for a few seconds.

It’s a man’s hand. It’s a mans hand on his cock in the alleyway behind the bar and just— Jesus Christ Richie how low would you have gone to get this? To get strong fingers wrapped around the shape of your dick through your jeans? What the fuck?

Patrick wants to laugh because he just crumbles, doesn’t he? Dying for it. He could be anyone and Richie would. _Jesus_ , he thinks, biting his lip so he doesn’t smile too hard. He should start charging. It’s not like he doesn’t get something out of it. He slides his thigh between Tozier’s legs after a moment or two, fingers jerking the fabric over the edge of the button of his fly, jerking his hips forward a little against his leg. He lets go to slip the cigarette from Richie fingers and toss it out towards the street in a burst of orange embers, and it’s as much a question as anything else. 

It’s a question Richie doesn’t know the answer to, because his eyes have slammed shut and he barely registers the cigarette being taken from him. It’s just the press of Hockstetter’s thigh and his body acting on its own, grinding down against it, stomach jumping under his fingers, choking out a “ _fuck._ ” And hating himself, but then—doesn’t he deserve this? Isn’t this what he fucking deserves? For being the way he is? It’s not even about being _gay_ anymore, because Eddie doesn’t deserve this. Eddie is sweet and generous and vulnerable and sometimes Richie feels like all he does is take take take so isn’t it only right that someone takes from him, now?

Patrick meets that pressure, thigh pressing up as he undoes Richie’s jeans, gets his hand inside, his zipper scraping Patrick’s knuckles as he grips him hard through the fabric of his underwear, gets a handful of his balls and oh, god, he could hurt him if he wanted to.

He doesn’t though. Just rakes his fingernails up over his lower belly and then slides his hand into his underwear, fingers circling the hot, thin skin of his cock. He half wonders what Felix thinks he needs him for. The sounds Eddie’s making sound pretty goddamn pleased, fucked out and fucked up, and if Richie’s this much of a coward, this desperate for it from _him_ , here in a back alley, Patrick doubts he’d ever make a move on Eddie. Patrick thinks he could probably get Tozier to do just about anything. “Don’t be rude, put your fucking hands on me,” he says, voice whisper-soft and hoarse near his ear.

“ _Fuck_.” Again, legs parting for better leverage, so that he can thrust and— He still hesitates. Is still waiting for some cruel trick from Hockstetter, because there’s no _way_ —. His hand shakes when he presses his palm against his crotch. Finds him _hard_ , and groans low in his chest. Thunks his head back against the wall and revels in the stars because this way he can—. He conjures Eddie’s face, eyes closed, sucks his lip between his teeth and thinks about Eddie above him, how he blushes so easily, how sometimes Richie can knock him speechless with anger or shock, how his mouth opens and opens and his teeth shine white while his tongue flashes pink. Hockstetter isn’t Eddie. His cock — what he can feel of it — is longer and thinner than his (but then, Hockstetter is hard and Eddie has only ever been soft when Richie’s walked in on him), but it’s still a _cock_. He’s still a man. And Richie though the haze and the Eddie _please please please_ above him thrills. Is awestruck. Draws his eyebrows in and thinks of that mouth and those hips and those thighs that Hockstetter doesn’t have.

And Patrick keeps his eyes on him. Keeps his eyes on him even when he drags his underwear down past his balls to reach him easier, even when he spits clean and white onto Richie’s cock, slicking his fingers through it so the whole thing is wetter, tighter. He doesn’t care if he himself finishes or not — sometimes he goes soft when he’s touching himself because there’s no one to watch fall apart — but he can feel the stutter in Richie’s breath and in Richie’s hands and he wants to see how far he can push, this time. If this time will open a door to next time. If he can get him to _trust_ oh, then—. That makes his own dick strain against his pants. If he can get him to trust, even a little, that’s where the real fun begins. He speeds his hand up to match the pace of the noises above and keeps his own mouth shut save the wicked grin plastered on his face.

It’s humiliating, Richie thinks, that this of all things is what’s going to get him off tonight, Eddie’s whimpers above him and Hockstetter’s hand suddenly _sliding_ without catching and if this is what sex with men means then oh fuck oh _fuck_.

Richie opens his eyes, finally, looks him dead in the face and remembers Bowers calling him _fag_ and _fairy_ and it could be enough to soften him again but it isn’t, because he’s undoing his jeans with unsteady fingers to return the fucking favour and clearly his common sense and dignity have left whistling with their hands in their pockets because _what the fucking fuck_.

He wants Eddie. He wants it to be the head of Eddie’s dick that his thumb swipes over but here he is. Working his arm until his elbow aches and shunting his hips into Hockstetter’s grip until his thighs tremble.

Hockstetter’s smile fades a little when their eyes lock, and he searches the look in Richie’s with something almost like curiosity. What is it like, he wonders, to feel shame? He knows what it looks like, when he causes it. The noises above ratchet up again, and he grins again, flicking his eyes upwards. “What would you do to him?” he whispers. “What would you say?” He presses into Richie’s fist, spine arching, looking down as he grabs a fistful of Richie’s hair and pulls his head back. He puts his mouth against his throat but doesn’t kiss him there. “Do you want to make bruises on his skin? Do you want me to make some on yours, so that he wonders? Ah—”

“I don’t know, I don’t— ahh—.” At the feel of teeth, of heat against his neck, the sharp sting of his hair being _pulled_ and god he hopes Eddie does that. He hopes Eddie does that almost as much as he hopes that he _doesn’t_ , because that would mean that he’s doing it to Felix. That he’s got his hands in Felix’s hair as he sobs and does whatever he’s doing to make the bed frame rattle like that. Richie hates that thought. It makes him imagine Felix there instead of himself. He lets out a little sob of his own as his throat catches, because— because Hockstetter is right. He’s not good enough for men like Eddie so he’s not good enough for Eddie and even if Felix _is_ like Bowers at least he’s fucking subtle about it, layered underneath money — god he hates him — nice cars — hates him — expensive suits — hates — sloping, relaxed shoulders and the ability to hold conversation without needing to ricochet like a squash ball around the room — hates himself.

He’s crying before he realises it, and coming at the same time, breath heaving as tears shatter and break and run down his face, bottom lip sucked into his mouth while he works his fist over Hockstetter’s dick faster; dry.

Patrick flicks his hand off onto the pavement, Richie’s come splattering somewhere. His eyes flicker over his face as the tears streak down his cheeks and he wonders what that feels like. He leans in and licks the place just below the frames of his glasses where the wetness catches the light, and then curls his fingers, damp with come and spit, around the back of Richie’s neck and pushes, coaxes him down to his knees, free hand taking his wrist and pulling it away from his dick where it’s starting to hurt. 

Richie goes, because what the fuck else can he do? He has no bones. He has no bones and he’s just— a guy did that. A _man_ did that. Richie wonders how he was just _fine_ living without that before and now, if possible, his heart is broken worse than ever.

Because if it was good with Hockstetter, how good would it be with Eddie? Eddie who is screaming in a way Richie hasn’t heard before— hasn’t heard it because— because maybe Eddie doesn’t want him to. Maybe he muzzles himself when he hears Richie come home. He has the self awareness, at least, to tuck himself back into his boxers and then his jeans before he sobs again.

Sobbing, on his knees, in front of Patrick Hockstetter. What the fuck is Richie’s life. He steadies his hands against Hockstetter’s thighs so he doesn’t tumble into him, and then looks up, panicked.

Patrick’s mouth twitches, halfway between a smile and confusion. He’s crying, but so willing, so pliant beneath his palms, and he runs his clean hand down over Richie’s curls, over the back of his neck because that’s what his mother used to do whenever he was sick, and maybe crying’s like being sick. it’s uncontrollable like being sick. It makes you weaker, he knows that. Bowers always liked making people cry. It meant you won. “What, you’ve never done this?” he asks, soft. “Don’t you want it to be good for him?” Runs his hand down over his hair again, soft stroking motions, like he’s a cat or something, grips his dick with his free hand and raises his eyebrows. “You could almost look good down there, Tozier, it suits you.”

Richie sniffs, once, heartily and then hocks the phlegm to his side towards the gutter, wipes at his eyes with the heel of one hand and grits his teeth until he stops. Stops crying, because once again; _what the fuck_. 

“No.” His voice is even more nasal than usual, gaze following from Hockstetter’s face above him down to watch the movement of his cock, the way it twitches, how it’s just starting to glisten at the tip and he thinks _Eddie has one of these_ , and his mouth bursts with saliva. 

He’ll never get the opportunity to do this to Eddie but. But if he ever did. If he were ever good enough for that. Richie silently promises to be good for the rest of his life if he can do this to Eddie, and as part of that, promises to learn to be good _for_ him. He opens his mouth.

Patrick guides his dick to Richie’s mouth, running the tip over his lower lip, pressing in. He wonders if Tozier will try and hurt him, he other people think of those things. Softly, one hand in his hair, he guides it further into his mouth, guides his head with the back of his hand, pulling him forward. “Might be better with your mouth, Tozier. Good use for it.”

The first, tentative, suck is instinctual. Richie’s eyes slam closed again, and it’s hard to get off a good one when his mouth is full of cock (oh shit), so he just grumbles in response. His tongue still feels like it’s swimming despite all this skin sliding through and gathering his spit and his lips feel like they’re going to crack and split with the stretch, but— but it’s good. He’d expected… different. That it would taste of something other than sweat and flesh but it doesn’t. It just kind of tastes like when he spills something bitter and has to lick it off his thumb. So he follows the lead he’s being given, fingers twitching against Hockstetter’s thighs, breathing deep and steady (snotty) through his nose as he goes.

Is this what Eddie tastes like? Is this how it would _feel_? Richie hopes he’d be a little less… mucus-y if he ever got the chance to be on his knees for Eddie Kaspbrak. What would his face look like? Would he make those same, high, fucked out noises he’s making now? And how long does it take for him to fucking come? How has Richie lasted less time than it’s taken for the slam of the headboard to be a constant tak-tak-tak, for Eddie to be incoherent? 

Is every first like this, with men? A flash bomb of pleasure and heat and then it’s over, more intense than anything else he’s ever had? More addictive than cocaine?

Patrick groans, very softly, guiding Richie’s mouth over him in a slow rhythm. He’s not rough — that’s not how you gain trust. He knows that at least. He just pulls Richie’s mouth down over him until he starts to actually feel it building up. “Are you a spitter or a swallower, Tozier?” Pressing his hips forward into that wet heat. “Haaaah. What kind of queer are you?”

The question _makes_ him swallow, because he hadn’t thought of that, hadn’t been thinking about that, had been so focused on the drag of his head over his tongue that he hadn’t even considered how this might end. And that makes him panic again, because he doesn’t _know_. He doesn’t know what kind of— what kind of _queer_ he is, and that— he bites down, just barely, realising as soon as his teeth graze him what he’s doing and stopping himself immediately. Makes a high noise of apology through his nose and _thinks_.

What is it like when girls do it? What do men like? What does _he_ like? What does he see when he (shamefully) imagines Eddie on his knees for him? He takes a deep, deep breath and hollows his cheeks. Moves his tongue so that the back presses up to make his throat tighter, curls it like a cat and furrows his eyebrows. How would he do it for Eddie?

Patrick digs his fingernails into his scalp when there’s a touch of teeth, but not enough to really be painful. A warning, that’s all. And then it’s better, oh— yes, it’s better. “Ah, that feels good,” he says, and tightens his fingers in his hair, tipping his head back, his hips forward, rocking into the tightness, the heat of little four-eyed Richie Tozier’s mouth, faggy Tozier on his knees for him, imagining someone else. It’s pathetic, and he comes without warning, the laughter low in his throat, petering out into a groan. He holds Richie’s head where it is, not letting him pull back, but not forcing him down, either. His thumb strokes through his hair just above his ear. “Ahhha, yes.”

Richie gags. Of course he does. He’s never had a stomach of steel and this— this is akin to the runoff of colds, that trickle in the back of his throat but sour, and he’s not going to fucking throw up out here in the alleyway on _any_ one’s dick, let alone Patrick Hockstetter’s. So he holds his breath until his diaphragm stops heaving and then… what is he? A spitter or a swallower?

Patrick isn’t Eddie. It would be different with Eddie. He wants Eddie to have things Patrick can’t touch. So he opens his mouth wide and lets it dribble down his chin and that, somehow, is worse. That makes him gag harder, because unlike swallowing this forces that sour bile taste to coat his tongue and— Christ. _Christ_ there must be a way around that. He’ll ask Bev. 

When he pulls away he leaves stands of his hair caught in Patrick’s fingers, and when he gets up his knees are damp. He spits, wipes his mouth, and spits again. From above, he hears _oh god I’m gonna come!_ and meets Patrick’s eyes. Because he didn’t last as long as Eddie did, either.

He’s zipping himself back up, smiles his snake-like smile. “We’ll work on it, Tozier. You don’t want your jaw to seize up if you ever get a chance with a boy like that. One who makes you blow him before he lets you touch yourself. Dying for his hands on you just for a second, but he wants to come first. Boys like that get selfish, controlling. Bossy. But you do look good on your knees. Keep that up here,” he says, tapping his own temple. 

“The fuck do you know. Eddie’s not like that.” It comes out too raw for his liking, so he spits again and remembers to zip up himself now that he’s standing. Slouches, now that it’s over, now he has to put that part of himself away again, hands in his pockets, a jaw muscle ticking when he looks away.

At least the noises have stopped now. It doesn’t mean he knows what to do, but his head is less cloudy. Beating less to the beat of _Eddie Eddie Eddie_ and more to _oh Jesus oh fuck oh shit_ , and he takes a half step away. Out of reach.

“Isn’t he?” Patrick asks, already wiping his hands off, fixing his hair, finding his cigarettes and tucking one behind his ear. Richie’s stomach gives a lurch

Patrick’s watching him slinking away like a feral cat, mistrustful and cautious. Afraid, still. “See you around, Tozier,” he repeats, echoing himself from earlier in the evening, in the bar, insinuating that this could happen again. “Don’t forget to lock up.”

He smiles, and then pushes his hands into his pockets, whistling something vaguely reminiscent of merry-go-rounds as he heads off towards the street.

And Richie’s left with that. _See you around Tozier._ Like Patrick wants… maybe the same thing he does. So maybe it’s okay. But that _isn’t he?_ repeats in his mind while he locks the doors, leans against them for a moment, and then half sprints up the stairs and into the bathroom to finally vomit.

 _Isn’t he?_ like he knows. Maybe he does. If he and Felix— guys talk, right? But what if— 

He rests his head against the toilet seat and moans, baleful, eyes closed, and doesn’t bother with brushing his teeth before he collapses into bed.

There’s silence from their shared wall. Silence aside from the quiet rumble of Eddie’s snore, held in arms that aren’t his.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> LOL yes, Eddie's bad boyfriend Felix crosses universes.
> 
> Series title is from an Okkervil River song of the same name.
> 
> Part title is from 'Slow Show' by The National


	2. vi-xii

**vi**

Less than a week later, Richie’s still reeling a little. Sometimes he wakes up from a dead sleep with the image of Patrick’s face too close to his. The light was bad, but Richie’s fairly certain that Hockstetter does _not_ have freckles. Or brown eyes. But he remembers the way it had felt to have someone else’s _hands_ on him — some other man’s hands on him…

He can barely look Eddie in the eyes over the weekend, and he throws himself into work early, stays late, and Hockstetter doesn’t show up again. Thank god. Thank god. He’s pretty sure that feeling is relief. He can’t fucking get himself off at all, not even when he wakes up early Monday morning with _Eddie_ behind his eyes — Eddie at eighteen, in Richie’s sweater after the skies had opened up on them one afternoon. His wet hair hanging into his eyes, and Richie finally getting him to laugh through his frustration because his shoes were new and would be ruined in the flooding sidewalks. “You want a piggy back, Eds?” Richie had joked, but then he _had_ and so they did that. Richie’s hands beneath Eddie’s thighs, the solid warmth of him against his back.

What it might feel like for Eddie to press against his back like that some morning, only in his bed, or Eddie’s bed or— 

And he slips a hand down to touch himself but suddenly it’s Patrick’s low laughter in his ears and Richie jolts up and out of bed, bangs around getting dressed. By the time he goes to piss he’s worlds away from having a hard-on. Eddie is already at work and Bev didn’t come home from Ben’s last night, so he’s alone. That makes it easier to exist. No one can see him, no one can judge him. No one can look at him and know what kinds of things he’s done, and with _who_.

He can’t believe he fucking cried in front of Patrick fucking Hockstetter, he’s twenty-two fucking years old. That’s what he’s thinking when he takes a drink of coffee, black because everyone forgot to buy cream. He’ll do that today, he thinks. It’ll be good to get the fuck away from here for a bit. Remember that the world exists, and that there’s people who don’t know him and don’t care to. People who won’t look at him and see anything other than… a slob.

And for a moment he thinks about Eddie and Bev. And how they both always look so good, so put together. What the fuck happened with him? And if he started trying now, everyone would know he was trying, and he’d probably be bad at it, somehow, and then they’d _know_ he couldn’t even get this right. 

And then he thinks, if he did it, if he dressed nice, if he did the clean lines, then maybe other people would look at him and see it. See what they see with Eddie’s loafers and his cuffed pants, and his carefully combed hair… and all the protective feelings he has for Eds don’t extend to himself. 

He’s two mouthfuls into his coffee when Eddie’s bedroom door opens and Felix appears — catlike where Hockstetter was reptilian, shirtless and lean and slightly muscled, bare feet on floorboards as he raises a hand in greeting. First thing in the morning and he’s a little tousled, a little ruffled, a deep red hickey shining over his shoulder. “Morning.” 

The sound scares him — thinking he’s alone in the house when a door opens, it practically makes him leap out of his skin, expecting werewolfgianteyeheadlessboyswheresmyshoe — Fortunately it’s mostly contained because he doesn’t spill any coffee on himself, just looks at Felix wide-eyed while his heart tries to find a normal rhythm.

Felix, meanwhile, crosses through to the bathroom, plucks his toothbrush out of the cup where it sits nestled with everyone else’s, stretching his back with his other arm raised over his head, lazy in his movements, leaning against the doorframe to watch Richie drink coffee. 

Felix watches his lips press against the rim of his cup and smirks around brushing his teeth, leans back to spit into the sink and wipe his mouth on a towel before joining him. The coffee in the pot is still hot. He drinks it without sugar and jumps up to sit on the counter, facing him.

“Sleep well?” It’s sly, because he sort of knows— Richie probably _isn’t_ , if Patrick was telling the truth. He could be lying, because Patrick does that, but Felix thinks that there’s a sort of honour code amongst men like them. He hadn’t shied away from his answers when he’d pressed bills into his hand and told him to _keep Richie busy_ , because Eddie is always so fucking distracted. He’s starting to hate the endless mentions of _Richie_ when he’s trying to get him wrapped around his finger. 

He hasn’t mentioned any of it to Eddie. Eddie seems like the kind of boy who would fly off the handle if he found out his boyfriend was paying guys off to untangle him from his best friend. He shouldn’t have best friends. Felix should be _everything_ to him. Because Eddie is too sweet for other people, and Felix is too possessive to allow anything else.

Richie watches him — undeniably beautiful, his flat stomach, his muscled arms. Richie feels every inch of his too much cream in coffee and sugary cereal and late night eye bags and too out of shape to take the stairs. Feels the softness of his upper arms, the soft place where his stomach stopped being flat when he was twenty-one, happy fucking birthday, Tozier. Now he’s just this weird mix of scrawny and soft, weird sinewy forearms, painfully sharp wrists and ankles. Has his fucking toothbrush been in there _all along_ when did that happen?!

Richie has the sudden, horrible thought, that Felix might move in. That this might indeed be That Serious. His leg starts this manic jostling rhythm beneath the table, trying to shake some of this anxiety out. He shrugs, though, puts on his best unperturbed face and says “Sure, slept fine,” and the nasal quality of his voice strikes him, suddenly, where he mostly doesn’t notice it — but compared to Felix’s smooth voice, his careful consonants, and Eddie’s light, rapidfire tenor and Patrick’s soft, smoky murmur in his ear. Even fucking Hockstetter sounds less… what’s the word? Obnoxious? Annoying? Irritating? 

He wishes he’d learned to shut up as a kid.

“I didn’t know you were still here.” 

Felix says “Mm,” and scratches his nose, pulls one leg up to rest his foot on the counter and drink his coffee with his arm wrapped around his knee, still looking him over, “Eddie’s got vacation time to use so he’s home at lunchtime today.” Like that is an explanation. “I’m going to take him for a drive. Get him out of the city for the afternoon, you know?” Get him away from Richie so he’ll be less distracted, less _worried_ , talk less about how Richie looks tired and won’t look at him and how it’s probably because he’s disgusted and how much that hurts. And _oh Eddie_ , Felix thinks, _if only you knew_. He sets his coffee cup down, interlaces his fingers and stretches until the bones crack. “What about you? Any plans for your day off?”

Richie feels that jolt through him. That Felix is taking Eddie _away_ , and Patrick— _Hockstetter_ , fuck — saying he wasn’t the first kitten Felix has tortured and what does that even mean? His hands are shaking suddenly and he sets his cup down, rubs his palms down over his thighs and tries to quell the shaking of his leg and manages, only he’s left with horrible silence and stillness and—

Suddenly he’s wishing that he had plans. That he was exciting, somehow, was doing something exciting. That he was at his— whoever’s house, like Bev is at Ben’s (except he just wants to be here with Eddie, that’s what he wants. Just the two of them, or the three of them, and _not_ fucking _Felix_ ). He wants to have a car he can take _out of the city_. He wants to have something, just one thing to make him sound less pathetic, and like his life is less pathetic and he hears himself says “I guess I’m going to buy more coffee cream,” and wishes Felix were the type to punch people in the face because then he’d be out cold at least.

Richie asks, “Where are you going, ‘out of the city’?” Fuck should he be _worried_? What did Hockstetter _mean_? And at the same time he’s trying to remind himself that Eddie is fine, and he doesn’t need him or Bill or anyone to protect him anymore, he’s fine, he’s capable, and maybe this jealousy he feels makes him no better than fucking Felix, who is trying to take Eddie away from him.

“Probably out to Forest Lake. Maybe take some dinner, I haven’t decided yet.” _I_ , not _we_. “You know black coffee is better for you. As good as coffee can be, anyway.” It’s not lost on Felix that he’s in better shape. Which makes him think— _why_ , Eddie? Why this dude? Why choose this guy over him? He thinks about the bonds of friendships forged as children. He’s never had that. Something stronger than class and money and charm, buying people off, wheedling until they want to be with him. Thinks about Eddie curled into his side in the dead of night. “They probably put all kinds of shit in creamer.”

“They put all kinds of shit in cigarettes too, and yet, here we are,” Richie says, getting up to _move_ to put some distance between them. He pushes the window open and— it’s facing the street, not the alley, so at least he doesn’t have to overlook the place where he…

Crying on his knees in an alleyway with Hockstetter’s fucking cock in his mouth. Imagining Eddie instead, trying to… trying— _stopstopstop_. He slots himself into the window seat amidst Bev’s stuff and his and Eddie’s and tries to project the thought _you don’t belong here_ into Felix’s head. _I fit here_ , he thinks, as he lights up, _I belong here, not you_.

And then with that same heart-stopping feeling he’d had when Stanley had asked them if they’d still be friends when they were older, he thinks _what if Eddie moves in with Felix?_

“Yeah,” Felix is laughing, sharp and toothy, hopping down and joining him at the window, taking a cigarette from Richie’s packet and tucking it into the corner of his mouth. “Don’t tell Eds. He’s going to outlive all of us.” He looks out at the city, the rooftops and the windows which all look the same. Thinks of his penthouse, blocks and blocks over, and how that would suit Eddie so much more. His fingers slide along Richie’s when he plucks the lighter from his grip and lights up too. Blows smoke out of the window. “It’s a nice view. Weird that they chose to have to the bedrooms overlooking the alley, huh?”

Richie jerks his hand away faster than he means to and wonders what the fuck it means that he’s more disgusted by Felix’s touch — clean, wealthy, charming Felix — than he was by Hockstetter’s skeleton fingers on his arm the other night, on his— “Why is that weird?” he asks, before his heart can drop. He pulls his legs closer to his chest, holds his cigarette close, thinks _get the fuck away from me._

“Well, I know what I’d rather look at first thing in the morning.” Waves his hand in the direction of the window, smoke trailing blue through the air. “And I keep being woken up by the fucking homeless people in the alleyway at stupid o clock at night.” The glance he shoots him is initially cruel, because he can’t mask it immediately, and then he smiles. “You know. It’s just a bit— when Eddie has to be up at five am. He’s such a light sleeper.”

Richie feels like someone’s dumped ice water on him, and for a moment all he can hear is his heart. He reaches up to fix his glasses and hears himself say “Eddie’s never complained about it before. Feel free to sleep on the couch, though, man, it might be quieter.” He looks up, eyes hard, stomach tight with anxiety. _He doesn’t know_ , he tells himself. _It’s not real it’s not real it’s not real…_

Felix’s mouth twitches like he’s trying not to grin, laugh, push Richie out of the window. “I think I’m just going to start taking him to my place after dates.” Raises an eyebrow when he meets his eyes, then looks out of the window again. “That way everyone gets privacy. Beverly at Ben’s, Eddie in the penthouse; you could bring whoever you wanted home.”

And Richie thinks _please don’t, don’t do that_ , and through the crack forming thorough his goddamn chest he says “No thanks,” and then gets up, steps around him and goes into his room for his wallet. He’s going out right the fuck now, he can’t do this, he feels like he’s going to fucking scream. Coming back out with his cigarette between his lips, raking a hand through his hair, still just in his sweatpants and a t-shirt, clothes he slept in, but he can’t stay here another second. “Are you just waiting here for him?” he asks, pulling his shoes on. He wants to know whether or not he can come home, or if he has to find something else to do until later this afternoon.

“I could go and bother him at work, I suppose.” Giving him an appraising look. Messy. He’s so messy. Why would Eddie—? “But then he’d probably scold me.” Holds his hands out in an expansive shrugging gesture, and grins. “He just looks so _cute_ all sweaty and—.” Furrows his eyebrows in an imitation of Eddie concentrating, “— anyone would be hard pressed to keep their hands off him, right?”

“Sure,” Richie says, shortly, straightening up and immediately dropping his keys. “I wouldn’t know.” He crouches for them, stands, drops them _again_ what the _fuck_ is wrong with him? Can’t he just have this? He grabs them again, holding them in a death grip. “Whatever you like I guess,” and he pulls the door open to leave.

“I think it’s entirely possible that our likes are very similar, pal.” Finally grinning, because got you he thinks, and maybe Patrick had a point about him. “But you wouldn’t know anything about _that_ , right?”

Richie stops, fingers on outer door handle, the stairs to the bar yawning below him. “Dude, _what_?” he asks. “Stop being fucking cryptic, what are you talking about? I have things to do.”

“Like getting coffee creamer?” He can’t help it, the amusement that slips into his voice. “Or hanging around in alleyways?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he responds, even though he feels like Felix has just set him on fucking fire. He puts his cigarette between his lips and turns. _Fuck you_ he thinks, refusing to feel the panic rising in his chest. To the rhythm of his feet on the steps: _Fuck you fuck you fuck—_

“See you around, Rich!” Is what’s called after him, and then Felix is fucking cackling with it, arms wrapped around his middle as cigarette smoke surrounds him.

**vii**

Richie doesn’t go home until well after dark, when he assumes Eddie and Felix will be… wherever they are. At the _penthouse_ or wherever. Bev’s curled up on the couch and he’s _so relieved_ to see her he practically starts crying. Instead he says “Hey,” and breezes past her into the kitchen because he’s bought coffee cream. Someone else has, also, bought coffee cream, probably because it took him about nine hours to do it, so Richie shoves his into the fridge behind that one.

He comes back out, drapes himself over the back of the couch and kisses Bev on the temple and says “Let’s get high!” It comes out a little desperate. He thinks that if she has plans with Ben he’s going to embarrass himself and try to talk them both into staying here with him, and he will pay for pizza and drugs and whatever else they want, he will even fuck off when they finally retire to Bev’s room to have sex, he just doesn’t want… he doesn’t want to be by himself. 

“Weed’s in my panty drawer, anything stronger is in the shoebox on the top shelf in my wardrobe.” Glancing up at him over the top of her sketchbook and smiling slightly, stretching so that her back pops and then doing the same with her toes. “I was thinking Indian food tonight. Ben’s at a conference and Eddie disappeared with—.” She wrinkles her nose and rolls her eyes, “— like five hours ago with an overnight bag. Go get the shit and I’ll roll a joint.”

Richie goes, wondering vaguely — as he goes through her things for the weed — what shit like this does to Ben. Ben must absolutely lose his fucking _mind_ whenever Bev says thinks like _weed’s in my pantry drawer_ whereas Richie mostly just wonders why anyone would pay money for something so insubstantial as whatever girls’ underwear is made of. He supposes it would look nice on Bev, but then most things look nice on Bev. He returns with it, says, “Move,” and takes the backs of her calves when she shifts her legs to make room and drops onto the couch heavily, letting her put her legs back if she wants. (Bev says: “Rude,” stretches her legs back over his lap and holds her hands out for the little wooden box, “gimme.”) He isn’t going to think about fucking Felix now, he decides. Or that gut-sick feeling he gets whenever he remembers that Felix _must_ know, or at least suspects what Richie’s been doing. He isn’t going to think about how it’s never the three of them anymore, since he showed up. Richie wants him dead.

Beverly considers him while she grinds, while she pinches out tobacco and then lines the weed alongside, licks the paper and fastens it all together, roach tight and perfect. “I’m thinking of getting a betting pool together regarding Felix crashing his fucking godawful car. The guys a fucking _tool_.”

Richie laughs in spite of himself. In spite of telling himself he wasn’t going to think about him. He laughs way too hard for what the situation calls for, and maybe a little bit of it is rage. Pure spite bubbling up out of his ribs. “I fucking _hate his guts_ , man,” he says, and shifts his hips to dig out his lighter, handing it over. And then his face clouds over as the thinks about all the things he’d like to say. Things like he’s _taking Eddie away_. “He’s a fucking snake,” he says. “We should cut his fucking head off for the greater good.”

“God, don’t tempt me. I’ll twist it off while he’s fucking sleeping.” She lights up, eyes trained on the cherry. “I don’t see what Eddie sees in him _at all_.” Sure, he’s neat and good looking, but he’s also a fucking prick. “The way he fucking talks to Eddie. And Eddie doesn’t even _sound like Eddie_ when he does it. He just fucking— simpers around him.”

He thinks _I don't want to talk about this_. But maybe he does, too, because he says “You know… I dunno, someone— I was talking to a… a customer, and… someone that knows Felix, and he said, exactly,” — holding his fingers out for the joint — “that he— that Eddie wouldn’t be the first kitten Felix has tortured. Like what the _fuck_ does that mean? Right?” His chest has tightened up and he takes a couple quick breaths. 

“It means whoever that customer was he’s fucking weird.” She hands it over and looks at him, eyebrows raised. “Who the fuck talks to strangers about the sex lives of people they know?” And then, pursing her lips and looking towards Eddie’s closed door; “if it just means kinky shit then fine, I mean, whatever Eddie’s into isn’t my business. Anything else— Felix lays a _hand_ on him and he’s fucking dead. I won’t even bother to make it look like an accident.”

Cheeks hot, Richie takes a long pull. “I think he’s bad news, I don’t know,” he says, holding smoke in his throat. “But maybe this is what Eddie wants. Like maybe he wants to be… Felix’s…” his jaw works as a plethora of _nasty_ words rise up. “Fuck,” he says, so he doesn’t say any of them. He doesn’t _mean_ them. He doesn’t. “I mean his mom was awful and overbearing, maybe he just wants some guy with money to do the same thing. Take care of him and tell him what to do.” Takes another drag that makes him cough.

  
“I don’t think it’s the money.” Darkly, looking at him through her eyelashes. “I do think that Eddie possesses a certain submissive quality, but it’s not— I don’t know.” Leans forward to take the joint from him, leaning back to take a deep hit and hold it. “It’s the same way he lights up when you start ragging on him.”

And god, she wants to tell him. She wants to tell him all the things Eddie’s told _her_ in whispers and whimpers since That Summer. But she can’t. So she won’t. Maybe, Bev thinks, watching smoke drift towards the ceiling, she can just nudge and nudge until they get there themselves.

“He lights up because he’s thinking of how to violently end my life.” But he’d be lying if that didn’t light _him_ up, igniting something that fizzes beneath his ribs like sparklers. They go out fast, as if they’ve been plunged into snow as he says “It’s not what you’re thinking, Bev, guys like Eddie don’t go for guys like me.” Thinks _they like clean lines_. Richie’s all chaotic spirals and squiggles, nonsensical. He shifts to face her a little more and says “Hey, question.”

“Hey, answer.” Lifts her head to blink slowly at him, smiling, smiling smiling because oh he’s so clever but so fucking stupid sometimes. “I get to ask you one after.” Because she’s going to nudge at both of them until they crack, she’s decided. She’s been patient long enough with the pair of them. And she _fucking hates_ Felix. Hates the look on Richie’s face when he’s around, hates the way Eddie’s smiles are turning hollow because he’s so close to getting what he wants and it’s not right. She knows he closes his eyes at night and sees Richie. She _knows_ it. And if somethings meant to be it’s meant to be. That’s what trauma fucking does. It binds people together.

He steals the joint back and wonders if he’s going to chicken out here. Even if it’s Bev, even if she _knows_ , without him telling her, how he feels about Eddie… maybe she doesn’t know how he feels about men. Maybe she thinks Eddie’s special which he _is_ , but… but it’s not just… Eddie’s not the _exception_. Richie’s just like this. Some kind of queer. One who spits, he guesses. Takes a drag, because it’s easier to ask through the haze: “When you’re giving head, what the _fuck_ are you supposed to do about the taste if you don’t want to swallow because—” he coughs again, lips closed, smoke spilling from his nostrils. “It’s fucking awful.”

“It is awful.” Mildly, pulling herself up to sitting and crossing her legs, fingers fiddling with an anklet. “There’s nothing you can do about the taste of someone else. If _you_ wanna taste good, pineapple. Like a fuck-ton. As much fruit as you can, really, and nothing fucking _spicy_.” With disgust on her face. “Nothing strong tasting, you know how your pee stinks after you eat certain things? Your come is exactly the same.”

And then she pauses, digests. “Does this have something to do with whoever it was that called Eddie ' _kitten_ '?”

He feels his stomach clench a little. “Is that your question?” he asks her, “Because you only get one.” Takes another pull and then hands the joint back, twisting to face her, pulling one leg up onto the couch, wrapping an arm around it. “It sounds like making your come taste good means you only eat fucking salads, I’d rather be dead.”

“That is _not_ my question, because I can read between the fucking lines. My question is; aren’t your glasses supposed to make you _less_ fucking blind, you complete fucking dumbass?” Leans forward over her legs to pull him in by his collar, mouth opening against his to blow smoke down his throat.

He lets her, opens his mouth to her, pulls in the smoke and thanks whatever is out there in the universe that’s still listening to him that she’s his friend, that he can love her unabashedly and fiercely and it doesn’t tear him the fuck apart. “I’m afraid to go back in for an eye exam because they’re going to tell me my eyesight’s worse _again_ ; I can’t go back to those fucking coke-bottle lenses, Bev, I can’t. Whoever called Eddie kitten was a one-off,” he adds.

“ _You_ should call him kitten. See what happens. Might help your eyesight.” Against his lips, grinning when she pulls back, eyes dark and irisless. “And don’t feel bad about spitting. I spat all the time before Ben went on a diet.” And then she starts to giggle, but not unkindly. “Any other tips I can give you?”

He holds her eyes, looking for a moment like he might kiss her, properly, but then he says “Yeah, how ‘bout, how do I cope with being a fucking fag?” He swallows, muscle in his jaw ticking because she _knows_ but he hasn’t said it. Not to anyone, not ever. Not even to himself, not out loud, not in his head. Faggot: Can you use it in a sentence? Richie Tozier is a _god_ damn— 

It’s not the word he should use, but it’s the one that sounds right in his head. Derogatory. Trashy. _Might be better with your mouth, Tozier_. Good use for it. He takes a breath, short and sharp, eyebrows shooting up before he starts laughing. Jesus Christ, he really said it.

Bev says: “By remembering that Eddie and Stan are both fags, and no one hates them for it.” Easily. Because no one hates them. No one ever could. “By remembering that we dismembered a demonic fucking clown at thirteen and we’ll do the same to anyone who makes you feel bad about who you are and what you like. Duh.”

Richie twists his mouth, rolls his eyes a little because of _course_ no one hates Eddie and Stanley, who could? He undoes the top two buttons of his shirt, pulls them apart to bare his chest with a little too much earnesty and says “Have at, then.” It might hurt less. If he doesn’t have a heart maybe he won’t feel it breaking every time he looks at Eddie, every time he hears him with Felix. “Think they’ll move in together?”

“Eddie and Felix? Fuck no. Eddie doesn’t _love him_.” But she’s leaning over her legs again, pressing her mouth against his exposed skin before she bites down hard. Because that’s what you get when you’re fucking stupid. “He’s never gonna move out. He’s happy here. And he doesn’t want to be tied down to the _wrong person_ , dipshit. Everyone has a first boyfriend. They very rarely stay with them.”

He squeaks and examines the mark when she pulls away. “ _Jesus_ , Beverly.” But her words circle him like a blanket, like sunlight. “What would I do without you?” he asks. “Did you know you’re my favourite? You like my favourite fucking person. I totally am going to call Eds ‘kitten.’ Let’s definitely do that,” he says, and then laughs. He feels better, a little. Lighter, maybe. At least she sees him. At least it’s not just Patrick fucking Hockstetter who can.

**viii**

Days off are rare. Eddie is so used to his internal body clock waking him up at five am that he doesn’t even question it. Slips out of bed and leaves Felix snoozing, doesn’t kiss his forehead or smooth his hair back the way he always does when he catches Richie sleeping on the sofa, shrugs himself into a robe and goes to brush his teeth and doesn’t think about the way Richie has been avoiding him. Because he’s gay. He’s sure that’s why. Because Richie, emotionally, is a closed fucking book to him most of the time. He can see through certain things, sure, can see through the jokes and shit but maybe… maybe.

He brushes until his gums hurt, and then goes to make coffee. It’s hard. It’s hard not being with the person you actually love. And he’s so tired. So he makes his coffee extra strong and closes his eyes when he drinks it, trying not to fall asleep before he has the chance to fry bacon and eggs and make waffles. Because if there’s anything that will force Richie to sit with him and acknowledge his fucking existence it’s breakfast food. Surely. He hopes so. He misses him. Lingers outside his bedroom door with his mug in his slippers for a second to rest his head against it for just a moment, thinking please _don’t hate me. Please stop it. Please._

It’s almost seven when he actually starts making breakfast, because that’s when Beverly gets up and starts hassling him for chocolate chips and mouthfuls of syrup over Nirvana, her long arms around his shoulders, feet dragging on the floor as he moves around the kitchen.

Richie emerges from his room and high-tails it to the shower because he can hear Eddie talking and fears maybe it’s Felix in there with him. When he emerges though, wet curls leaving droplets on his glasses, water bleeding into the neck of his t-shirt he catches that blaze of red hair and hesitates. Eddie’s door is closed, so Felix must be here, but he’s not _up_ which means… He leans in the doorway of the kitchen and it’s so familiar. Just Eddie and Bev and soft morning sun and he can pretend, for a moment, that it’s just them again. Just this. He remembers when he first moved in here, and how he’d felt home for the first time. Remembers going to his parents’ for Christmas and missing home and realizing that that was here. He doesn’t go home for Christmas anymore. And he _misses_ Eddie. His eyes linger on him, maybe a moment too long, how serious he looks when he’s concentrating on anything, before he says: “Any coffee left?”

“In the pot.” Beverly answers for him, because Eddie is momentarily struck dumb, staring back at him like the first light of dawn. He decides that, obviously, praying in doorways works, and his heart thuds in his chest and his eyes follow trails of water down his neck and oh he wants to _cry_. It feels like he hasn’t _seen_ Richie in years and this is how he’s greeting him? The world is unfair. 

“How do you want your eggs?” Once he’s over that initial shock, once he regains feeling in his fingers and remembers that he has a boyfriend. _I’d leave him for you_ , he thinks, flips bacon over.

Richie wants. So badly he wants to get in Eddie’s way, distract him, tickle him, harass him, distract him from breakfast like he used to, and as he comes up beside him they’re so close that their arms brush and it actually sends a thrill through him. “Aw, Spaghetti, are you making breakfast? Over easy, please.” He pours his coffee, and then, because his heart is pounding out this desperate beat that he’s sure Eddie can _hear_ he shakes his head like a dog and sends water everywhere, all over Eddie, into the bacon. _Notice me notice me notice me._

“ _Ouch!_ ” Because it makes the pan spit, oil splattering over his hands and arms, stepping back to glare at him. “You fucker! Make your own damn eggs!” Because the alternative is to actually cry. He can feel it in the back of his throat, hard and hot and painful in a way that being around Felix isn’t. He’s just _there_. There because Richie isn’t. Would never be. Because he’s straight, right? He’s straight. Eddie rubs the little pockmarks raising on his skin, frowning tightly, eyebrows knitted together before he returns to the cooker and moves the bacon onto a plate. It hurts, but not as much as having Richie near him does. Always.

“Eds, no,” and he reaches for him, pulls him around to face him whining “You make the eggs so much better.” He turns the tap on cold and pulls his wrist beneath the stream, fingers around Eddie’s palm. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean — here, want me to kiss it better?” he teases, practically fucking vibrating with tension. Because everything he does is wrong. He’s not smooth like Felix, not all easy charm. He’s not clean lines.

 _Yes_ , Eddie thinks and doesn’t say, staring at their hands under the water for longer than he needs to, committing the entire touch to memory. All of it. From the warmth radiating from Richie, because he always makes his showers too hot, to the grip of his fingers around Eddie’s palm. He opens his mouth to respond, and then can’t do that either, because;

“You okay, Eddie?” Felix lounging in the doorway, eyes flickering from the tap to Eddie, to Richie, half smiling. “I thought I heard—”

“Burned myself. I’m fine. Good morning.” Like he’s frozen there, holding onto Richie’s hand ( _I’d leave him for you_ ) while Felix crosses the room and puts a hand around the back of his neck. Eddie ducks away from the impending kiss, untangles his hands from Richie’s and goes back to the pan.

Richie pulls away as soon as Felix touches Eddie, but not before then. He’s not going to let go of him, his best friend, just to look like he’s not doing anything wrong. He _isn’t_ , they _weren’t_ , and he’s not fucking afraid of Felix. Still he grabs his coffee and shoots a dark look at Bev as he goes into the fridge for the cream. He joins her at the table, sitting close, keeping his eyes down as he takes a drink that’s long enough to scald his throat, and at least that takes away from the hollow beating of his heart. 

And Bev, in turn, when their backs are to her makes a throat-wringing gesture at him. She wonders, sometimes, how much of her father is in her. What, exactly, she’s capable of.

“Is, um, is everyone good with over easy?” While he cracks eggs into the pan and spoons bacon fat over them, the tension in the air crackling through him and he wonders if it’s _him_ Richie has a problem with or… Felix settles a broad palm in the small of his back and he fucking— okay, Eds, act normal. This is your boyfriend. You’re fucking this guy. Stop fucking pining after a dude you cannot fucking have.

And then Bev smiles, shoots Richie an amused look; “Fine by me, kitten.” Laughing over Eddie’s sputtering when he struggles for a response, because goddamn it Bev.

Richie, already smirking darkly at the neck-wringing gesture suddenly laughs out loud, nudging her with his shoulder in gratitude. And he doesn’t look at Felix’s hand on Eddie’s back, but he does look at Felix. Thinks _I’m not afraid of you_. And maybe he’s braver when Bev is here, when Eddie is. He wonders what Eddie would have done, if he’d heard the way Felix talked to him the other day. Maybe he wouldn’t have done anything, because looking back, Felix hadn’t said anything all that bad. That was what was so goddamn snakey about him. He’s a manipulator, he’s sneaky. he says things without saying them, and he can’t get into trouble. Richie thinks _Eddie wouldn’t even believe me if I told him_. He was even asking himself in the shower this morning if he’d imagined it, what Felix was saying. Maybe he was just projecting. But no, he thinks, catching Felix’s eyes and feeling his stomach flip. He wasn’t. The guy’s a cunt. And Eddie deserves better, even if it’s not _him_.

There’s something flinty in Felix’s eyes when he looks back at him. Taking him in, damp from the shower, the way he laughs with Beverly, Beverly calling Eddie _kitten_. His jaw clenches. He’ll have to get rid of them both. And Eddie is so sweet, so unaware, shaking the pan until the eggs are _just_ firm in the yolks before doling them out. He should be having breakfast alone with him, not having to move out of the goddamn way for this woman to take a plate, not watching like a hawk when Richie approaches, his hand returning to Eddie’s neck and squeezing slightly, locking eyes with Richie over his head.

 _Mine_.

Richie considers taking his fork and plunging it into Felix’s eye and thinks maybe that would be _kind_ of funny. Instead, with a wildly self-destructive whine in his head that drowns out all reason, he takes his plate from Eddie’s hands, kisses him hard on the cheekbone (a little more violently than the way he kissed Bev the night they got high) and says “Thanks, kitten, you’re the best,” and feels his heart skip, beneath the anger, beneath the fear, beneath the desperate aching desire. He just wants Eddie to know that he loves him. That he has a thousand quiet things he wants to call him, a thousand names he could never say to anyone else. He fixes his glasses as he pulls back.

Felix doesn’t miss it. The way Eddie goes bright red and drops the spatula, shattering an egg yolk, their eyes meeting for the briefest of moments before Eddie looks away again. He thinks _you fucker_ and steps closer, behind him, cheekbone resting on the top of his head, watching him flip the broken egg to cook it through. Feels his gut clench up when Eddie stumbles over ‘you’re welcome’ because not once has he managed to make him stutter like that. And he wants to. Brings his gaze up to Richie, lips white and angry, and thinks _I will pay Patrick fucking extra to end you._

**ix**

Richie coasts on that look Felix gives him for days and days. Knowing that he’s made him furious, knowing that Felix perceives him as a threat, somehow, for some reason. Well, good. Good. What Richie doesn’t like is the way Felix is suddenly _always_ around. Climbing up the steps to their front door (apparently he has a key now), stopping by to pick Eddie up for lunch or brunch or dinner — taking him away again and again — coming out of the bathroom just before Richie goes to brush his teeth in the morning. 

Richie stays in his room more, unless Bev is around. He exhausts his tapes, reads, feels like he’s going fucking _crazy_. He writes a little, but his room makes him claustrophobic and the writing comes out frustrated at best, angry at worst. Not funny ever. It’s turning almost into a goddamn journal and he _hates_ that. He doesn’t want that. He throws it out into the living room one evening where it lands, splayed, on the floor beside the couch. Fuck standup shit, the bar gig is fine for now. It’s good. He _likes_ the bar, most days, when he’s not mixing drinks for Felix.

Hockstetter doesn’t come back and Richie thinks maybe it really was a one-off, and tells himself he’s relieved.

He trudges up the stairs one evening after his shift and reaches for the bathroom door just as Felix emerges, bare-chested, still faintly sweaty, eyes flint-dark, and Richie gets the sense that he was just… waiting for him. The tap isn’t dripping the way it does for a couple minutes after you turn it on to wash your hands. His hair isn’t wet from the shower. Felix smirks at him and as Richie steps back to let him pass he notices the scratches on his chest, on his back, bright pink, puffy and new — Eddie. Richie’s stomach churns. He slams the bathroom door behind him, stands under the too-hot shower, shivering with that spine-shaking tremor, and just burns.

And, speak of the devil, or maybe he jinxed it, two nights later, Patrick — _Hockstetter_ — slips back into the bar, takes over his stool in the corner of the bar and holds his cigarette in spindly fingers until Richie, trembling, lights it for him. He doesn’t say anything. Just sits and waits and Richie passes him another bottle of Guinness without a glass and Hockstetter smokes and watches him, half-shadowed, like a demon.

Richie feels like there’s a demon in his head. He wonders if the light above Hockstetter’s stool has _just_ burnt out or if he hasn’t noticed it until tonight. Hockstetter stays until close, and Richie stalls, climbing onto the bar to change the bulb long after everyone is gone, after he’s cleaned up, and bagged up the trash. He takes deep, steadying breaths before he goes out into the night, cigarette already between his lips. He drops the trash and sees him, shimmering to movement in his peripheral, distorting the light from the street, but doesn’t look. As he turns to go back in, he turns into Patrick and doesn’t say anything at all. Just inhales when the glowing embers of his cigarette are touched to Richie’s in the dark.

**x**

Felix hears the noises halfway through taking Eddie apart upstairs. Grins into his throat and rolls his hips forward until he squirms. He’s still thinking, in the back of his mind, about the ways in which he has fucked with Richie recently. About making sure he can see the marks he makes Eddie leave when they fuck now, about making sure he brushes against him in the kitchen, about just showing up when Richie is leaving, about whisking Eddie off in front of him and making him say goodbye with that grin on his face.

Because he knows that Eddie— well, he’s not stupid. Eddie doesn’t love him, but he’s not sure he loves Eddie either. What he thinks of when he thinks of love is ownership, or at least, it’s closer to it. He wants to own Eddie. And to do that he needs to fuck harder, maybe in all senses of the word. So Patrick is back and Eddie is going to face what his fucking— _best friend, Felix, I’m worried. He hasn’t spoken to me properly since I came out and when he has he’s been weird when he has and I don’t know what to do. What if this_ — is doing, leans up on his forearms and covers Eddie’s mouth with a palm.

“Sh.” A short, harsh, burst of air against his cheekbone. “Listen.” He’s still moving into him, still knocking these minuscule moans from his throat, tightens his fingers until Eddie can barely breathe and it’s just the thin whistle of him taking in air.

He makes him listen to Richie — having faith that Eddie would know Richies voice swear, an “Ah, fuck—” so soft it’s on the edge of hearing, watches Eddie’s eyes go dark with panic, can hear _oh god he’s hurt himself he’s hurt_ like Eddie is whispering it, but all that’s actually layered under the rumble of Patrick talking and the sound of Richie moaning is his own breathing. His own grunts when he fucks into Eddie harder and sees the panic melt away into jealousy, into heartbreak.

Felix doesn’t understand how Richie doesn’t see. Doesn’t see the way Eddie _loves_ him. He isn’t sure he’s ever had that or will have that, but there’s definitely something gratifying in watching him hurt like this. In muffling his sobs into his hand like this so Richie won’t know. Won’t hear. Squeezes his fingers until Eddie’s cheeks go white beneath them and grins down at him. Lowers himself to get at his neck and bite a bruise just under his ear, more a ring mark of teeth than a true love bite. Rubs his nose over the flesh and then upwards.

“No point pining anymore, okay? No more of that.” 

**xi**

Patrick — _Hockstetter_ — noses along the edge of Richie’s ear as they jerk each other off. Like the last time, Richie comes first, canting his hips upwards into Hockstetter’s palm, free hand gripping the wall behind him because he doesn’t want to hold onto him. And when he’s done he doesn’t need Hockstetter’s push to get down on his knees and finish him off, spit him out. He just does it because some little part of him wants— wants to make him feel good, wants to be… good enough. Maybe he’s scared that he’ll lose this, and then who… then who will bring him back to this place — another man’s hands on him, another man’s breath on the side of his neck, shaking softly, another man’s hand twisting through Richie’s curls, dragging them through his fingers until it hurts, as he sucks him off.

Hockstetter finishes his cigarette while Richie’s mouth is on his dick, and when he can bring himself to look up, there’s just the dark shape of him, glinting eyes over bright embers before he pushes Richie’s head down over him again, Patrick tipping his head back to look up at Eddie’s window.

They don’t say anything at all to one another. Richie climbs to his feet as Hockstetter zips up his pants and disappears out into the street. He goes back inside and this time he doesn’t cry, doesn’t throw up. He just feels hollowed out, like there’s nothing left in him to give. He stands down there in the darkness of the bar for a long time, dreading going upstairs, dreading running into Felix. He wants to brush his teeth, but he finds something strong to drink behind the bar instead, something that burns his gums. The sun’s coming up by the time he makes it upstairs to bed.

He notices the mark beneath Eddie’s ear the next day. He wakes up around noon and comes out of his bedroom to Eddie walking in the front door. “Oh,” Richie says, coming up short, still wild-haired from sleep, still not having brushed his teeth since the night before. That was where he was heading, but Eddie stops him. “You’re—” _you’re here!_ His heart is pounding, something like joy rattling through his limbs. His eyes light up, even though he doesn’t say it. “I figured you’d be going to lunch or whatever.” Because Felix always whisks Eddie away. On purpose. Richie knows it’s on purpose. He tries not to look at all. Sometimes he doesn’t even say bye, and then feels bad about it for hours. He thinks _don’t you know I miss you all the time?_

“Oh,” Eddie replies, because he hadn’t been expecting to see— so soon after _hearing_. Flushes down his neck and brings a hand up to cover the mark with his sleeve. “No, I—.” _I need time, after last night_ , because Felix had been _cruel_ with it. He’d recognised that cold calculating look from fights with his mother, and they hadn’t even been _fighting_. Felix had been _inside_ him and made that face. 

To Richie, he says; “It’s probably healthy to have time away, right? You know, let yourselves miss each other?” He cannot fathom wanting that with Richie. His whole teenagehood and young adulthood has been hours of missing Richie when he’s in the same fucking room. “Did you, uh, did you get up to much after work?” _Tell me. I need you to tell me so I know. So I know you’re not ashamed. So I know you wouldn’t be ashamed with me._

 _Let yourselves miss each other._ “Ew,” Richie says, to that, before he can stop himself, but then Eddie’s asking that question and he thinks _Felix fucking told him—_ “Just… no, just what I always do. Lately your boyfriend’s always hogging the bathroom at all hours so, I—” _stay downstairs, suck off the guy that beat the shit out of all of us in middle school, you know, the usual._ He waves a hand at the bathroom. “I was gonna shower…” he says, still watching that trailing flush on Eddie’s face like it’s a goddamn sunset.

“Well I— I’ll ask him to start showering in the mornings then, I just thought you preferred morning showers. Jesus.” The look he gives him is wounded, because Richie sounds mad at _him_ for some reason. Eddie doesn’t know exactly what he’s done wrong, and he’s not getting mad at _Richie_.

Which makes him mad at Richie.

“I didn’t realise me having a life would be such an inconvenience to you two. I know Bev doesn’t like him either.” He soothes his stinging ego by lashing out, pressing hard against the circle on his neck, eyes on the ceiling above richies head. Thinks about hearing the shifting of feet last night, the noises he’d heard through the screaming denial in his own head, the panic over not being able to breathe in a truer way than he’s ever known, looking up at Felix and realising that his boyfriend is capable of more than Eddie could have imagined. “I’ll start staying at his more. Did you remember to take the bins out?”

And in his head Richie starts going _no no no no no_ , but it’s spinning out of his control. “That’s not what I was sayi— no, fuck, that’s not what I'm saying, Eddie, jesus. And you _do_ have a life, don't be so melodramatic,” is what comes out of his mouth instead of _you have a life here with me and Bev._ “Jesus, he really brings out the _best_ in you.” He feels like the silence between them rings after that. He didn’t mean that, either, and he's thinking about the bins… when has he ever forgotten… what does he…

He thinks about Eddie’s open window. Thinks _but he’s so loud…_ and feels his heart squeeze because he wishes he _didn’t_ know that. And all at once he realizes… he didn’t… he didn’t really hear… He goes tense all at once, shoulders going tight, drawing himself up to his proper height as his eyes go dark. “Wait, what?”

 _Oh shit_ , Eddie thinks, half shrinking where Richie _expands_. “Just, you know, I thought I heard— foxes— last night. Did you just— dump the bags— or did you actually put them in the cans because they’re gonna split and we’ll end up getting rats again you know?” He thinks he should be a better liar with how much time he’d spent lying to his mom over the years. Maybe it’s different when you love someone. Richie doesn’t scare him so it’s harder to lie to him. 

After last night he thinks he’s going to become an expert at lying to Felix.

Richie’s eyes go, somehow, even darker, and he swallows. He can’t breathe either, and he can’t answer, because Eddie is fucking _lying_ and he doesn’t think he’s ever done that before, not like this, not to Richie’s face, when it _mattered_. He makes a sound like a laugh or a cough and steps forward, pulling Eddie’s hand away from his neck. He’s not rough — or maybe he’s rough like young boys are, all sun-hot skin and dirt under their fingernails and wanting to touch without being seen. Or maybe that’s just Richie. The mark is stark red, obviously teeth, bruised at the edges. “What the _fuck_ , Eddie,” Richie says, letting him go. And the fear in him runs out into anger like a roof caving in under the pressure of rain. “What the _fuck_ is this? Aren’t you always going on about how there’s dangerous bacteria in— are you just going to let him… it’s going to get fucking infected.” And he sounds like Eddie. Or maybe that means he sounds like Mrs. K. Echoing through her son, and through his friends. He hates himself. He _hates_ Mrs. K, and he hates Felix more. He wonders if there’s any more marks like that on him. And where. Wonders if Eddie likes it or, worse, doesn’t.

Eddie says; “hah?” When Richie touches him, those fingers clasping around his wrist, and pulls back hard just as he’s let go. “What do _you_ care?” Because Richie is preoccupied. Hadn’t been— hadn’t said— it’s a personality crash, maybe, between him and Felix. Maybe. That they’d hate each other even with Eddie out of the picture. “It’s not like he broke skin.” Covers the bruise up again and takes half a step away from him. “It’s none of your fucking business anyway, is it?”

Hurt flashes through Richie’s eyes “It is— it _is_ my business if you’re getting hurt, it is my fucking—” he stops himself. “Bev would do the same thing,” he says, hoping he’s right. Or maybe Eddie is. Maybe it’s not Richie’s business. “Maybe the fact we both fucking _hate_ him is because he fucking sucks. He’s gross and mean… he’s always got his fucking hands all over you.” Breathless, careening too far into something dangerous. “He’s t— he…”

“ _You’re_ gross and you’re being mean _right now_.” Like that’s not childish, like it’s not just Eddie defending himself from the shame and the hurt that Richie’s not being honest with _him_ either. “I’m not _getting hurt_ Richie.” But then— what Eddie wants, what he wants more than anything is Richie doing it in Felix’s place. To _make_ it his business regardless of hurting. That’s what he’s wanted since he realised that was a viable fantasy. “And like. Yeah. He’s got his hands all over me. Fair enough you don’t want to see that. I’ll try and keep it in my room from now on.”

 _Great_ , Richie thinks, _I’ll see you even less_ , and he wishes he could take all of it back. He didn’t want to be angry, he didn’t mean to get angry at Eds. And it’s ridiculous but hearing him say _you’re gross, you’re being mean_ , that hurts. Hurts more than it should. “You know, fuck— why _don’t_ you fucking move in with him, why even bother— it’s not like we ever fucking see you, since you’d obviously rather be with _Felix_ anyway. Just get out. Go live your fucking domestic fantasy in his _penthouse_ with windows that don’t overlook the goddamn alley if it bothers you so fucking much.”

Eddie winces his way through the tirade. He deserves it, he knows that much, but he doesn’t know why. “ _That’s_ not whats bothering me.” Hands curling into fists at his hips, face turned up into his; “and I didn’t want to move out. I liked living _here_ with you guys and things with Felix have just— moved quicker than I thought, but fine,” If Richie doesn’t want him there anymore then there’s not much use staying, “fine, I’ll get my shit packed up and you can advertise the room, okay?”

Richie goes completely still, breath catching in his throat. He wishes Bev were here to diffuse this, fix it, beep beep before things got too fucked up. “Th— that’s not— you— fuck, then what the fuck is _bothering_ you then?!” _Foxes, rats, homeless people… him and Hockstetter_. His chest constricts. “No, you know, what, no. Do whatever you want, Eds, living with a stranger would be the exact fucking same, since I don’t even fucking know you anymore.”

Eddie stops breathing. Completely stops and stares at him and bites down against his own teeth hard and goes red in the face. “Yeah, fucking same to you pal.” Blinking so that the tears either fall down over his cheeks or retreat again, eyelashes sticking with the salt. “You don’t even fucking look me in the eye anymore. Since I told you I was— and at least _I told you_.”

Richie’s eyes are searching, chest heaving quick short breaths that feel like they’re doing _nothing_. “I’m literally fucking looking at you,” Voice rising too much, definitely shouting now. He gestures at him wildly like _I’m looking._

“What am I supposed to be fucking telling?!” Richie asks, and he doesn’t know, anymore, whether he wants Eddie to know or whether he doesn’t. He’s fucking scared, he can feel the blood draining from his face the way he does when nausea overtakes him. 

“Stop fucking _yelling_ at me!” Through the tears, which have come back because he’s fucking mad now. He’s pissed and he doesn’t understand why. This is the jealousy he’s felt over girls and over _things_ taking up Richie’s time but a thousand times worse. Because it’s a man. Eddie heard a man, down there, with him, and Felix has described everything to him in vivid, soft details like he _knew_. “Never fucking mind, okay? Never fucking mind, I’ll start sleeping with my window closed or you can— I’ll arrange to be out of the place one night when Bev’s at ben’s and you can just— keep fucking hiding shit from me, fuck.” Storms past him, making for his bedroom.

Richie spins, grabs for him, catches him by the wrist and pulls him around. He almost kisses him. Almost says _fuck it_ and kisses him. And he made him cry, he did. He’s no better than fucking Hockstetter and Bowers in his goddamn padded room and… and he’s gross. And mean, and a fucking coward. He’s had Patrick fucking Hockstetter’s come in his mouth, and he thinks he should be allowed to kiss Eddie? Their Eddie, who used to be Richie’s favourite person in the goddamn world, who still is. 

He lets him go, steps back. “You’re just going to take his word as gospel?” he asks, voice strained. “I know he’s been saying shit about me, but you’re gonna believe _him_?”

“He didn’t have to say shit, Richie.” Rubbing where he’s been grabbed at and manhandled too much in the span of twenty four hours, eyes charcoal dark and just so fucking _sad_. “I heard you.” _I heard you while he held me down and made me listen, so fuck him and fuck you._ Puts his hand back over the mark on his neck. “I told him I’d have him over again when this heals up so. You don’t have to fucking hear _me_ for a while.”

The ground drops out from beneath Richie. It’s like he goes deaf, there’s just this high pitched whine in his ears. He turns away, dreamlike, and suddenly he’s back in the fucking arcade with Bowers screaming faggot at him. He turns back and can’t look at him. He could meet Bowers’s eyes, but he can’t meet Eddie’s. Instead he just blinks, quickly, steps around him, grabbing his coat from the rack, picking up his shoes and going out on to the landing in his socks, slamming the door behind him. _I heard you._

It’s not fair. It’s not fucking fair. 

He stops at the bottom, sitting on the last step and pulling his shoes on. He’s forgotten his wallet, his keys upstairs, fuck.

_I heard you._

He doesn’t know why that makes him cry, choking that first sob out into his sleeve, eyes squeezed shut on the bottom step. That _Eddie_ heard. Does he know _who_?

_You’re gross._

He gets unsteadily to his feet and pushes his way outside and into the street and just starts walking. 

**xii**

It’s not hard to find Richie Tozier. In fact, he’s exactly where Felix said he would be, buying cigarettes with pocket change at the grocer at the corner of his street. He steps inside, coming up behind him at the counter, leaning over it without looking at Richie to buy his own pack, watching in his peripheral as Tozier, rattled, takes his time putting his change and his cigarettes away. They go out more or less together, both of them lighting up on the sidewalk. Using their own lighters — it’s still too early in the day to be standing too close, and they both know it. Besides, Tozier looks jumpy and feral. “Didn’t think you ever left the bar,” Hockstetter says, and it’s just met with a shrug and a flicker of a glance. He drags, hollowing his cheeks, keeping his eyes on him as he asks, soft: “You wanna go somewhere?”

“ _Yes_.” And it maybe comes out a little more desperate than he intends. He can’t stop thinking about Eddie’s face when he said _I heard you_. Like Richie had betrayed him, but he fucking _hasn’t_. He’s just— just getting his fucking rocks off like every other fucker. If every other fucker were also in love with their best friend. If every other fucker were burning from the inside out with jealousy.

He keeps thinking about the bite mark on Eddie’s throat. The way it’s been made _just with teeth_ makes his stomach flip. Richie lights a cigarette, blows the smoke to into the sky and hopes that wherever Patrick wants to go it’s close.

It’s close enough. And almost a squatters residence. Almost. It’s definitely run by a slumlord, but it means Patrick’s left alone. The building crouches, mostly forgotten, by the train tracks. The freights shake his bedroom on the second floor once every couple hours, and all through the night. Everything is sandblasted grey or rusted. And there’s no one around. There used to be someone in the downstairs apartment, in the basement, but they got busted for cooking meth months and months ago. Patrick honestly doesn’t even know if the landord’s realized. Or maybe the landlord’s dead. Still, someone takes his cash every month. 

He’d gone down there when it was clear no one was coming back and helped himself to what was in the cupboards, the drawers and cabinets, then shut the place up again. His own part of the house has a separate entrance. It’s all warped floors and dark wood. There’s almost no personal touches — no posters or pictures on the walls, no books, no TV. You might think Hockstetter just sat and stared at the wall when he had free time. A rocking chair sits on the front porch like it’s waiting for someone. The whole place creaks when the wind wraps around it, screams through the windows where they don't fit the frames. 

The place is small, and the walls buckle oddly, as if the roof is pressing down on them. There’s cracks in the paint. Downstairs it’s just a living room, and a table crammed between that and the kitchen. But it’s clean. That makes it eerier, perhaps. The sun slots its way through slats in the blinds, illuminating odd parts of the floor and walls, glinting off of the glass left on the kitchen sink to be washed. There are bleached bones from little creatures on the window-sills. Somewhere in the back of the closet, there is a pencil box full of flies.

He doesn’t ask him if he wants a drink, just pulls beer out of the fridge and holds them both out in one hand, spindly fingers around their necks. 

Richie doesn’t like it. He doesn’t like it at all’s makes him appreciate the coziness of the flat above the bar, all of their stuff everywhere, the faint smells of cinnamon and aftershave and red wine, Eddie — _fuck, no, don’t think of Eddie, thinking of Eddie is painful_ — their pyjamas drying in the bathroom and risotto on the stove or instant noodles in the microwave.

This is just an expanse of nothing shaped like a place people live. He takes a beer anyway, twists the top off and takes several, long swallows. And he’s— he’s so _fucking_ angry. “Eddie heard us.” Like he’s somehow to blame, Hockstetter. “He fucking— and that _prick_ , Felix—“ he’s pacing. Talking without realising it, drinking his beer and smoking his cigarette and pushing his fingers through his hair because… apparently Hockstetter is safe to talk to, now. His he’s had his dick in his mouth. Twice.

There’s a thrill there, when Tozier starts talking. No one’s talked to him since high school, not like this. Not like _confiding_. He feels like he’s accomplished something, and he wants more of it. He likes earning trust, likes how soft it makes people. Soft, like clay. So he goes quiet and watches, pale eyes tracing Richie’s trajectory. He touches his own bottle to his lips but doesn’t drink. “I thought we were being quiet,” he muses. “Hm.” He wets his lips with the beer, but doesn’t swallow. “Felix is a prick,” he adds after a moment of contemplation. “That’s what happens when you get everything you want.” Eyes flickering over Richie’s face as he smiles, twisted. “He has what you want.”

“Yeah right.” He scoffs, hides, scowls, pretends that that doesn’t hurt him all the way through like when lightning strikes too close. “What’s that, then? Dickhead car, dickhead job or too much money?” Leaving Eddie out of it. Out of his choices with Patrick. Because it’s separate. He has to separate it. This is happening because no one else will have him, because he’s not good enough yet, because he wants to be good for Eddie in a way totally different to what he wants from anyone else.

Even Patrick, who still— who has the skill, still, to light up that part of his brain. It’s not fucking— it’s not the _same_ as it is with Eddie, his eyes lighting up over the first spoonful of chicken soup in the middle of a cold and saying _thank you Richie, this is the best soup I’ve ever had_ or looking him up and down and _those jeans look good_ , or the way he has, a few times, come home from work and melted into Richie’s palms, has willingly sat between his legs on the couch and gone boneless as Richie rubs the heels of his hands hard into the muscle of his shoulders. The small of his back. The closest he’s ever come to him, and it stopped the moment fucking Felix—. “ _Fuck_.”

Patrick tips his head to the side, eyes lidded, almost sleepy. “Eddie,” he says, “is what I meant.” He shrugs a shoulder as he sets his beer down, looking away from Richie, his long fingers toying with the neck of his bottle. “Why not say something to Eddie, if that’s what you want?”

 _If_ he’s _what you want_ , Patrick hears. It’s his mother’s voice. _‘People aren’t things, Patrick…’_

“Because.” Richie says. “I can’t. We don’t work like that, I guess. Besides, he’s got a boyfriend, so obviously _not_ something he wants. And besides _that_ it’s not your business.” He’s glaring at him but there’s no real heat. It’s not Hockstetter he’s mad at. It’s Felix and him and _Eddie_. “Felix is just— he’s always fucking _there_. I can’t take a shit without him flushing the chain, man. He’s just so fucking— snide.”

Patrick breathes a laugh through his nose. “That’s funny,” he says, and then: “Felix knows he gets to you. Just shut it off.” Because that’s what Felix wants. He wants Richie worlds away. He wants Eddie to stop looking to him, for him. “Right now he’s reading you like a book. You’re very open,” he says, waving a hand over his own face. “Easy. You always were as a kid, too. When your mouth wasn’t getting you into trouble, your face was. The glasses are better, though.”

“Fuck you, at least I feel feelings to show.” He regrets that immediately, and then squints at him over the top of his beer bottle. “How do you know all this shit? I thought you weren’t friends.”

He laughs, soft and genuine. “I’m not friends with anyone, I just know a lot of people. I’m not exactly functioning on the right frequencies, Tozier, the stars didn’t align right when I was born, something didn’t click. I’ve been fired from more layman’s jobs that I can count, and Felix pays good money if you run an errand or two, and there’s lots of sad motherfuckers out there who just want something that helps them feel good. He fishes a bag of Ritalin out of his coat and drops it on the counter, another bag of multi-coloured MDMA. “There’s more upstairs, if you want.”

“Fuck. What the fuck?” He’d maybe suspected. No one around here has the kind of cash Felix flaunts about without getting mugged, and since he hasn’t been mugged yet there must be some muscle behind him. “What kind of errands are we talking about here?” Once again assessing. Is Eddie in any danger? Is he going to get hurt? _Is Felix violent?_

He thinks back to the bite mark and thinks _yes_.

“Who knows,” Patrick shrugs, “Drugs mostly. I didn’t ask too many questions. You don’t want in, Tozier, do you? A good little boy like you?” Teasing as he lights another cigarette. 

“No.” And then he thinks about it. About the money he could earn. How he’d be able to afford to be the one taking Eddie for trips to the country. Out for dinner. He thinks about how it would be an excuse to hang around with Patrick, to do— whatever it is they’re doing. To seek out whatever it is he’s seeking. He looks down at the bag of MDMA and picks it up to rest its weight. “How much is something like this worth? What do you get paid?”

“More than your bar gig,” he says, honest. “Especially factoring in time spent working. Think you could hack it, Tozier? Felix won’t take you on if he can’t trust you, but I could put in a good word for you. You’d better work on masking that mess behind your eyes, though. I can practically hear your thoughts like a radio. It’s loud in there.” He taps his fingers against his own lip, contemplating him. _What’s that like?_ he wonders. 

“Fuck, no.” He tosses the bag back onto the table, having entirely forgotten the conversion was _about_ Felix. And then, a flash of harrowing, terrifying panic; “do you think he’s got Eddie doing this shit?” Eddie wouldn’t. He wouldn’t, right? Eddie wouldn’t do that. Not the Eddie he knew, he wouldn’t, but Richie had said himself he didn’t know him anymore.

“ _Kaspbrak?_ ” he asks, giggling through it. “No way in hell.” He stretches until his spine pops, reaches for the pills again and begins to tuck them away. But… he fingers the ecstasy before he holds it out again, letting the bag dangle from his fingers. “Ever tried it?”

“Nah, I’ve— I smoke weed and I’ve done coke, but.” He shrugs, and doesn’t ask why it’s funny, the thought of Eddie pushing drugs. Maybe he can see why. That wasn’t the point of the question. The point of the question was _how much control does he have over Eddie?_ How far was he willing to go to hold that control? How deep does it go? What will it take for Felix to let go?

Richie asks: “You offering?”

And Patrick gets that dark thrill through his gut again, at the possibility of trust, of a willingness to lose control. He wants to break off a piece of it. “For you, I am.” Strange pale eyes on him, even more mercurial in this colourless place— blue, grey and green. “First times only, though, Tozier.”

“And seconds, too, apparently.” And then, with a small shrug because he hates himself anyway and he wants to _forget_. Wants to have the whole thing slip away from him. Arguing with Eddie is the worst thing in the world all by itself. Arguing with Eddie over his boyfriend is somehow even more terrible, if that were possible, but he’s reaching his hand out with the palm upturned for a pill. “Fuck it. It’s been a long day.”

“Hm, seems so,” he says, low, as he hands him a pill, but doesn’t take one himself. He holds the bag in his hand like he might, like he’s considering. It’s like he doesn’t know when to stop watching, when to look away. His expression is intense, but there’s a quiet behind his eyes, a calm. “But you didn’t come here to talk anyway, did you.”

“Does that matter? What I came here to do?” He takes the pill, swallows it down with a mouthful of beer, and tries to stop slouching. The more they do this the more confusing it is. It’s not— it’s getting off. Sure. He’s having orgasms but that doesn’t make it good. Richie, maybe, doesn’t fully understand what he’s getting out of this yet — besides the fact that it’s a _man_ touching him. A man, a man, on his body. 

He shoves his hands in his pockets and looks at Patrick levelly. It’s not even that he’s not scared anymore. He’s just _tired_. Tired of running into Felix, tired of hearing Eddie through the wall, tired of running around Eddie with his cycles getting tighter and tighter until things like today happen. The shouting, the crying, Eddie looking hurt and him storming off. That’s not what he wants. He wants his best friend back. 

“Well,” Patrick says into the silence, “if we’re not going upstairs, because you’d rather be talking, _I’d_ rather be outside. There’s more to look at.” Patrick spins the bag to close it and puts it away. “That’s going to take a few minutes to kick in, if you want to wait. Since I can usually bring you off pretty quick”

Blunt.

“Hasn’t anyone touched your dick before, Tozier?”

“People have touched my dick,” defensive, because fuck, that’s the last thing he needs Hockstetter to think. What he means is _women have touched my dick, and it’s different isn’t it, with a man._ “You haven’t exactly been running marathons with me, man. Hasn’t anyone blown you before, Hockstetter?”

“What do _you_ think?” Patrick asks, smiling at him before he takes a drink. Outside the tracks start to shake. “I’m going up,” he says and takes the bottle with him as he heads for the stairs. The truth is, most of the time sex doesn’t even occur to him. When it does, once in a blue moon, it can be intense, heavy, but it’s not exactly physical attraction. It’s something deeper, sharper. Something that wants to consume, set alight, take apart. He wanted to take Henry Bowers apart. Thought maybe Henry could understand him, because of his dad. Because he wanted to put a bullet through small soft things. He was wrong, though. Henry Bowers was different than Patrick thought. He thinks he could want to do it to Richie Tozier. He likes the jagged bits inside him. Wants to reach in and test his luck against the edges. 

“I think you’re an asshole.” Honest, frank, and getting to his feet to follow him up. It makes it all the more complicated. Patrick is Eddie’s opposite in every way. Eddie’s soft edges and kind words and warmth, and as he climbs up the stairs behind Patrick his stomach flips in a sick sort of way. Okay. Okay, no, freaking out won’t help anyone, stop it. He takes a deep breath and reminds himself that he _wants_ this. He wants to know what makes Eddie feel good. That’s why this is happening. It’s for a good cause and that counteracts anything _wrong_ about it. If he’s doing it for Eds, it’s worth it. His stomach flips again.

Patrick’s room is as bare as the rest of the house, but the bed at least has some colour in it, greens and tans and navy blue. It’s shocking colour against the whitewashed walls, the dark floors. The train rattles by, right by the window, cars flashing past and past the glass at Hockstetter’s back, throwing him into flickering, sharp relief against the white sky overhead. 

There’s almost too much noise to speak without shouting, but he opens the top drawer of his dresser and tosses a ribbon of condoms and a bottle of KY jelly onto the bed. Meets his eyes like he’s just offered him a cup of tea. The train’s last car passes, leaving a resounding silence in its wake. “If you want,” he says, dropping down onto the mattress, changing the height between them on purpose. Tozier looks freaked, and he feels his heartbeat speed up, the same way it does in the alley whenever he makes him jump. 

“What— what for?” Like he doesn’t know. Like he hasn’t watched porn. “I mean— which— which—.” Which way around does he expect this to go? Richie _feels_ it when the drug hits, when his pupils expand, everything suddenly too bright. He sort of half gropes his way to the end of the bed and sits, turned so he’s facing him, eyes on the lube. The packet of condoms. Stuff that hasn’t necessarily occurred to him, not _really_. Like he didn’t expect them to have physical form. Or maybe just that he hadn’t expected Hockstetter to have it here in his bedroom like he’s been waiting for Richie or something. Maybe he had expected to be the one to insist on that shit, or something. He doesn’t know.

Patrick shrugs. “It doesn’t bother me.” Looks up at him, eyes moving slowly between Richie’s. “You know… I could show you. What Felix does.” Trailing his index along his own bottom lip. “How he wraps little Eddie around his finger. Imagine if you _knew_ everything Eddie liked. What gets him hard. You might even be able to win him over, then Tozier.” Flicker of his eyes, up and down. “If you cleaned yourself up. You’ve got a more interesting personality than Felix anyway. Little Aspirator Kaspbrak might get bored or being an accessory, sooner or later. Don’t you want to be there for the fallout?”

Richie is nodding before he realizes, mouth open and cheeks flushed because that’s _exactly what he wants_ but there’s no way Eddie would let him, now. After this afternoon. And then his words connect and he blinks. “He… tells you this stuff? What— he tells you about Eddie?” He doesn’t feel any of the things he usually does. The anger. The concern. The jealousy and revulsion. Left in place is a gentle curiosity, a longing to _know_ Eddie like that; from someone else’s perspective. How does he look to people who don’t _know_ him? What secrets does he tell people who _aren’t_ Richie?

Why does he always think of things to ask Bev about when he’s around Patrick fucking Hockstetter?

“I hear things…” Patrick says, and then leans forward, slow and easy, no caution at all in him, resting his fingers against Richie’s shoulder as he gently wraps his teeth around the same place Felix had bitten Eddie — something he’d learned about over the telephone today. He doesn’t bite down, but he could. Maybe he will be able to, later. He thinks about Richie’s expression, pupils blown open and dark dark dark, and wonders what it’s like to want someone as bad as Richie wants Eddie. “…Things like this,” he says against his skin. Knuckles sliding down his arm to his thigh. “What makes him scream…”

Richie hates it. The way heat rushes through him and settles along the line of his hips, hands lifting to rest on Hockstetter’s shoulders as he shivers, tilts his head to the side… imagines doing this to Eddie. Making Eddie make the noises he’s heard through the wall just by doing this. “What— what do you hear? What does he tell you? Aren’t you worried I’ll— tell? That you’re talking shit about him?”

Patrick feels him shiver, and shifts closer. Sniggers: “No. He’d probably get off on it.” Draws back to hook his fingers in the collar of Richie’s shirt, pulling it steadily until the button unravels, drops onto the bed. “Get out of these,” he says, and draws back enough to grab his own shirt at the back of his neck and pull it over his head. He’s painfully thin, feral-looking. His ribs are countable, all the way up his chest. Draws dark hair out of his eyes. He bites his lip as his eyes flicker once, quickly, to the beside table, then back.

Richie takes off his shirt probably slower than usual, watching Patrick, watching him look at the cabinet and back. Digests his words slower, like they have weight. That Felix would get off on him knowing. That if Felix would then maybe Eddie— no. No, no. That’s not what Eddie is like. There’s just no way. Felix is just a fucking weirdo. 

He lifts his hips to shove his jeans and underwear down, pauses to kick off his shoes. “What does _that_ mean? What the fuck does he tell you?”

Patrick watches him, almost mirroring him as he slips out of his own jeans and underwear, his own shoes. He’s still sharp, pale, tendons starkly evident behind his knees, at his ankles. The question bores him, so he doesn’t answer. Who knew, he thinks vaguely, that weedy little Tozier would grow up to be so broad. He presses his palm to his chest, almost as if checking to see if it’s somehow an illusion. “You’re not half bad, Tozier. I’ll bet he looks at you…” Pushes gently. “Lie back. I bet he imagines you holding him down. You’re bigger than Felix.” Grinning he traces his own collarbones again, like he did in the bar. 

There’s not much for Richie to say to that. He doesn’t believe him. There’s no way someone could look at him and look at Felix and think that he’s somehow stronger. The comparison weakens the more layers they take off, in his head. Felix is _chiselled_ in a way Richie doesn’t think he’ll ever be. Now that he’s grown up his body is growing out — weird soft parts and weirder overstretched elastic parts like a worn rubber band. But still, the praise. The _thought of that_. Of Eddie looking at him and thinking that he’s not bad and wanting— wanting. So he lays back and thinks of that. Of what it would be like to catch Eddie looking

Nothing much behind Richie’s eyes, or at least not what Patrick is looking for. “Your dick is bigger,” Patrick says, matter of fact as he climbs over him, knees on either side of his hips. “You’d have to work him open.” Tilts his head. “Probably for a good long while. He’s not very big. All narrow hips. But, you’ve done this, haven’t you? You know how you’d open him up? Fuck him with your fingers while he looks up at you.” Softly as he runs a hand down over Richie’s neck, over his chest: “Holds your shoulders, digging his nails in, because it burns in that _good_ way.” Runs his fingers down to circle Richie’s dick. “You know what I mean by that, right?” 

And Richie chokes on the moan that leaves his throat, hips shifting up into the fist Hockstetter is making around him, flashing hurt and flushing down his neck and chest. He’s thought about it. But maybe it didn’t connect for him — like the lube, and the condoms — that there would be something physical and visceral about it. That Eddie would _hurt_. That Eddie would _like_ being hurt. And now he’s seeing that. Imagining his fingers disappearing into soft heat and— “Fuck.” Gentle, eyes lidding, going dark and desperate all at the same time. “You can’t— don’t— you talk like you _know_.” And that hurts worse. That Hockstetter knows these things where he doesn’t. That Felix is just _okay_ telling him these things. Letting him into things he has no business in.

Patrick meets his eyes, his own giving nothing away. He strokes him with one hand, undoes the cap and squeezes lube onto his fingers with the other, smearing some of the sheets, passing his thumb over his fingers until they’re slick and glistening. “You want to know, I’ll show you,” voice very soft, barely a murmur as he lets go of his cock to push his thighs apart, readjusting himself so that he’s between them, slicked fingers sliding back behind his balls and down to his entrance. “How to find that place inside him that will make him forget everyone’s name but yours.”

“You talk like you know _him_.” Richie clarifies, before he feels that touch. It’s like his brain bubbles over, a mixture of _oh no_ and _oh, please please_ as he parts his legs on instinct and lifts his hips. What does it look like? When Felix does this to Eddie? _Does_ he do this to Eddie? Does Eddie go red like he does when Richie—? How much of him has Richie already _seen_ without realising? How much has Felix shown Patrick? His stomach rolls, again, nausea flooding through him and he doesn’t know — can’t tell — if it’s the _thoughts_ or the drugs, but he lets his head fall back as he groans and closes his eyes, fists his hands in the sheets and grounds himself.

“Maybe I do,” Patrick says, soft, slipping his finger into that silken heat, starting to work him open. “Did you think that Felix was his first, Tozier? He doesn’t have the patience.” He pushes a second finger inside, searching for his prostate, hooking his fingertips there and pressing down. “Eddie’s always been so _eager_ to please… he was even easier than you to coax out back.”

Richie can see it. He can see it so clearly. And he hates it and he thinks— _he doesn’t have the patience_. And Patrick _does_? The intrusion burns, makes him hiss and shake, one foot flattening against the mattress as he lifts up again to relieve the _pressure_ he suddenly feels. “Fuck.” He breathes, again, sweat starting to shine on his forehead, across his nose. “Oh, fuck, but—,” but, but, but. He’s about to say something he knows he shouldn’t. He knows. But his tongue is looser than his body and on the next moan he says; “but he’s _scared_ of you— how—?” He doesn’t even know if he wants to know, all he can think is that _these hands have touched Eddie too_. And maybe that makes it better or maybe it makes it worse but he just— “Oh, oh, _shit_.”

Something twitches at the edge of Patrick’s mouth, but his expression is detached, calculating. “Desperation does funny things…” Scissors his fingers, adds a third, moving more quickly than perhaps he should. “He knew I wouldn’t talk, knew his secret was safe. He knew me better than some stranger. He knows what can happen to men like him. And he wanted to be taken. Wanted me to put marks on his body with my mouth, where no one could see them.” With his free hand he softly touches the inside of Richie’s thigh. “Here.” Inside his hip. “Here… He would beg me to do it.”

The shake of his head is disbelief rather than refusal, unable to stop the whine or the shift of his hips upwards, sucking his bottom lip into his mouth and biting down as hard as he can. Eddie. He wouldn’t— would— Richie didn’t think _he_ would and yet here he is. Because it’s easier with someone he knows. Because it’s better than going out and finding a boyfriend who isn’t Eddie. “He would have told me.” 

Would he have, though? Would he? Richie hasn’t told him. He let him find out on his own. _You’re gross and you’re being mean now._ Like Patrick is mean. Like maybe, maybe Felix is mean. “I would have seen—.” But Eddie has been weirdly touchy about Richie seeing him for… for a while, now. He wants to concentrate on what he’s feeling physically, on the the stretch of his body around fingers, on the palm on his hip, but— 

Richie decides he doesn’t like pills at the same time Hockstetter moves his fingers and makes him moan again, shaking with it. “Eddie—.” But the sentence is gone before he can say it, and his teeth hurt from grinding them, and his head is starting to throb. “Hockstetter I—.” He doesn’t know. His body is moving on its own as he bucks against the hand, chewing the inside of his mouth.

“He was _so_ tight,” Patrick murmurs as he pulls his fingers out and reaches for the condom, breathing faster. “You could fill him up, if you had the guts. How would you do it, Tozier? Would you look him in the eyes when you sink into him, or turn him around and take what you want? Fuck him into the mattress. Hold him down and make him gag for it?” Working himself quickly to full hardness, he rolls the condom on, fingers quick, slicking more lube over it. “You want me to tell you what I did? When I brought him here and fucked him in this bed?”

 _This is what he does. This is what Hockstetter does. He’s fucking with you,_ Richie reminds himself, and it’s easier to do without the fingers in him, lifts his head to watch as he touches himself to shining and shaking his head again. “You didn’t.” But there’s no certainty. It wavers. Because he’s not sure if he does know Eddie anymore. It’s totally possible that Eddie would come here and _not_ balk at the thought of how many diseases he could pick up. He doesn’t give him an answer on _how_. That’s not his business. And Richie doesn’t _know_. It’s always been facing each other, when he’s let himself think about it. Always Eddie’s eyes on his, those freckles, his hands on his thighs where _Hockstetter says he’s left bruises._

Richie’s dick jerks against his stomach. Maybe he’s just as fucked up as the rest of them, but… he thinks of the ring of teeth on Eddie’s skin and bites down against himself. He could do that. If Eddie let Patrick— Why hadn’t he let _him_?

Patrick reaches out and plucks the glasses from Richie’s nose, pushes them onto the window sill where they tap a possum skull that spins idly to face the glass. He presses his fingers down over Richie’s mouth and pushes him down with force. It’s the first time he’s used it, leaning up and pressing him down into the pillows with the full weight of his upper body. He grips himself with his free hand, finds his entrance and pushes inside, and it’s not gentle. He’s worked him open, but it’s not the same as just fingers. He pushes all the way in, at least as far as the tension in Richie will let him push, and gasps out a soft shuddering breath against the back of his knuckles. They’re so close, his dark hair brushes Richie’s cheeks. He groans, and then “He looks just like a little deer, trembling. Wrapped his legs around my waist and pulled me in. He blushes all the way down to his dick when you fuck him.”

Richie grits his teeth so hard it’s painful, clenching and unclenching around his dick as his body rejects both that and what he’s _saying_. Now he’s blind he feels more vulnerable, more on edge, fingers scrabbling for purchase as he lets out a deep rumbling groan. And then slowly, although the burn doesn’t go _away_ , it fades into a dull pleasure. Something which coils in his stomach and behind his knees, tingling all the way up to the base of his skull, and he gasps out a breath that sounds like a laugh. He thinks of Eddie. Of doing this to Eddie, making him feel like this, _seeing_ the flush that Hockstetter’s talking about trailing down his chest and across his hipbones. “Ah, fuck—“

“Yeah you like that, Tozier, don’t you? Always knew you were a little fucking fairy.” Drags his fingers down along his jaw, dragging at his lower lip. “How does it feel, huh?” Rocking his hips into Richie’s, quickly, eyes darkening for the first time. “Does it feel good?” Leaning over him to speak against his temple. “You want bruises where he can see them, Tozier? Want to make him _burn_? I’ve seen him looking at you. Looking like he wants to take a bite.”

“It _hurts_.” And Eddie likes it. This gets Eddie off. Richie makes a kind of moaning-sobbing noise as he covers his face with one hand because the ceiling is starting to swim. He hadn’t— it’s not like he was expecting Patrick to be gentle, exactly, but it’s— different. He shudders as the angle changes, as his dick _hits_ and catches, moan turning sharp and neck straining.

 _It would have been different with Eddie_ and _no going back now_ and _always knew you were a little fucking fairy._ Richie shudders again, toes curling, knees lifting for a better angle, for the one that makes sparks light up behind his eyes, gets a hand around the back of Patrick’s neck and pulls him in.

Patrick doesn’t expect that somehow, the tug downwards, and he gives a soft intake of breath that’s almost a gasp. He turns his head to the side at the last moment, but their mouths catch at the edges. Patrick Hockstetter has never been properly kissed by anyone. He didn't imagine it would happen now and it throws him a little. He reorients himself, forearm wrapping around Richie’s head on the mattress, as the touch against his jaw goes soft. For a moment it’s almost gentle, the way he wraps around him. He takes him by the chin and tilts Tozier’s face away, leaning down to bite into the skin of his neck, more of a lovebite than Felix’s ring of teeth, but purposeful all the same. So it can be seen, between where the collar of his shirt will rest, and his jawline. 

And the pace changes when he’s pulled down — down to where he can feel Richie’s breath shivering against the steadier rise and fall of his own ribs. He pushes into him slower, and for a moment there’s a low flickering of panic, powerline buzzing in a puddle of water. How strange. He gets his fingers in Richie’s hair and pulls his head back on the pillows so that it can’t happen again. He closes his teeth around the lines of his adam’s apple and laughs, soft, slides his tongue over it. “He can take better than you can,” he says and then picks up the pace again. Presses into him hard until the metal headboard hits the wall. Echoing the sound that floated down to them in the alley. “He’d say your name—”

“He’s had more practice.” And it comes out like he thinks Eddie is— but that’s _not_ what he thinks. It’s not. It’s _not_. He’s not dwelling on how it hurts to not be kissed, to have everything but kisses, because Hockstetter says that about Eddie, and his _name_ and he can hear Eddie saying _Felix_ saying _Patrick_ saying _Richie_ and then he can feel his skin bruising like an overripe apple, like accidents as a kid, like the bite Eddie hadn’t bothered to hide.

And the frame is hitting the wall, and he’s back in the alley with the rolling in his hips and his stomach and his thighs, drops one hand to wrap around himself, the other letting go of Patrick because _obviously not_. So he turns his head to the side and closes his eyes and just _feels_ where it’s slowed down and roughened, feels how Hockstetter is taking him apart from the inside out, feels how it burns. Like the jealousy. Like knowing he wants to put his hands on Eddie and can’t. How it would feel to have Eddie gasping _Richie, Rich, Richie_ instead of fucking _Felix_.

When Richie comes it’s with a growl, ripped from him, hand a blur on his dick, and he’s too— Eddie saying _Richie_ saying _Felix_ saying _Patrick_ — too _furious_ to be embarrassed at the speed. It just means he’ll last longer next time. He’ll last longer when he can have this with Eddie.

Patrick takes longer, this time, rocking into him until the headboard is like a second heartbeat in his ears, until it’s just physical sensation and sound. He keeps his eyes shut and, before he comes, he sinks his teeth into the flesh of Richie’s shoulder, biting hard enough to hurt, but not enough to draw blood — like Felix does. He spills himself inside him, and then pulls out, panting. Reaches over him to drop the condom into the waste bin and then gets up, naked, sheen of sweat on his back, disappearing into the hallway and coming back with a roll of toilet paper so that Richie can clean himself up. He settles himself against the headboard beside him and lights a cigarette, eyes on the fading light outside the window. “Train should come by again, soon.”

“Is that my cue to leave?” Once the trembles abate, wiping his stomach and chest off and wrinkling his nose, self loathing rushing back into the empty corners now he’s not— fuck.

 _Fuck_.

He stands, knocks Patrick out of the way with his knee and grabs his glasses, eyes dark and slanted and _hurting_. Snatched his clothes up from the floor and hoists himself into things that don’t feel like they fit anymore. They’re too big, or he’s too big, he doesn’t know. Bev would be able to fix it. _Eddie_ would be able to fix it. It’s all Felix’s fault. Every part of this is, somehow, Felix’s fault. Richie clears his throat, swallows down the vomit-heat rising in his chest, locates his cigarettes and lights one of his own.

“You can leave if you want,” Patrick says, not bothering to get dressed. He reaches up and pulls some tobacco off his tongue, thumb and index sliding along the sides of it, eyes still dark. Watches as he gets dressed, as he lights up. “Or you can stay, if you want. It doesn’t bother me.” Thinks, and then: “You won’t see Felix around here, though. And there’s hot water. And I won’t tell anyone.” And the thought of him staying is intriguing. He likes it, but he doesn’t _want_ it. He thinks again, about the almost-kiss as he takes a drag.

And, knowing it’s a bad idea, Richie sits back down. Leans over him to flick his ash into the ashtray and—. He wants Eddie. Curls his legs up to his chest and looks out of the window and wonders. “Does he love him? Felix? Does he love Eddie?” Because maybe— if he does, Richie will back off. He will. He swears. If it’s love. If they love each other.

Patrick sniffs through his nose, furrowing his brow as he follows Richie’s gaze. “I don’t think Felix loves anything but himself. Anyone,” he corrects. _People aren’t_ things _, Patrick_. He looks over at him, studying the lines of his face. “You look better undressed,” he tells him, then rolls his head until his neck pops, leans over to flick his ashes into the ashtray. “Does Eddie love him? That’s what you should be worried about. When people love something there’s no more room. When they’re loved they can still make space.”

“I don’t know. Bev says he doesn’t, but. I don’t know.” He tugs at the bottom of his shirt, sticks his finger through a perfectly round singe-hole and sighs. “I think he’d lie to me anyway.” 

“Why would he lie?” All of this, Patrick thinks, is complicated, tedious, but he likes the way this scene overlaps their past. He remembers what it feels like to hit Richie in the mouth so hard his knuckles split, and their blood mixes on the back of his hand. He remembers how easy it was to hold him down, even though he could twist and squirm like a weasel in a trap. And now… this. Willingly here, in Patrick’s house, his bed. Not resisting pain the same way he did as a kid. Still afraid maybe, but distracted. So distracted by Eddie Kaspbrak it’s like the pain and fear dissipates. That’s interesting. He thinks Tozier is lonely, which is funny because he has so many friends. Customers always talk to him in the bar, Patrick has watched. All that attention, all those things to do, and yet his eyes go constantly to Eddie, like magnets.

He wonders what that’s like. 

“He was lying before I— came here.” And the memory is painful, so he pinches the bridge of his nose between a thumb and the first knuckle of his forefinger. Squeezes hard like he’s having a nosebleed. It feels like years since he left the flat. Since thinking _I could kiss him. I should kiss him_. All at once he doesn’t want to be here anymore. It makes him feel sick. Like Eddie thinking this is a betrayal makes it so. He crushes out his cigarette in his palm with barely a wince, drops it into the ashtray and stands with his belly fucking lurching. 

Eddie won’t even be there when he gets home. He’ll be out with Felix. But— Eddie’s told him to stay away. Stay away until the bite mark heals. Or maybe he’ll get home and Eddie will be gone along with all his shit. Fuck. He rubs a hand over his face and clenches his teeth hard. All his actions recently have been fuelled by anguish and anger. He’s so fucking tired.

“You should just tell him,” Patrick says and feels that little flicker of _Whoops_. That’s not what he’s getting paid to do. Felix is paying him to get Richie out of the way. _Oh well._ “Are you afraid that he doesn’t? What will happen then?” Patrick gets out of bed, pulls on his jeans. “You won’t die.” Curious, he reaches out to take his wrist and pull him around, inspecting the place he pressed his cigarette to his palm.

“I know I won’t die. I’m not a fucking teenager.” Eddie makes him feel like one, sometimes, but he knows he’s not. Lets Hockstetter take his hand and then pulls it out of his grip, hard. Because after the fact the man is disgusting on some level. Empty. Uncanny. Like a mannequin or something. Waxy and unnatural. “I’m not telling because, as it’s been pointed out, I’m not what he fucking wants, am I? _Men like him like clean lines_ , remember?”

Patrick shrugs. “I’m surprised your lot is so discerning. I thought they took any poor losers in. But I can help with clean lines, if you want” and then he giggles, stepping around him to open the drawer of the bedside table, fingers closing around the rough wooden handle of a skinning knife.

“I don’t want him to— just because he feels like he _should_ , fuck. That’s not what I want—” He sees the glint and— Richie panics, vaguely, takes a step back and stumbles over his own feet. Remembers Ben’s stomach the first day they’d met. He remembers that giggle, too, and why Patrick Hockstetter is dangerous. “The fuck are you gonna do with _that_?”

“Settle down, Tozier, we’re just making memories.” Stalks around him like a wolf, cutting off the exit, his eyes strange in the fading light. Outside, the tracks begin to shake. “Train’s coming,” he says, switching his grip on the blade so he’s holding it backhanded. He reaches out with his free hand and takes his shoulder. “Don’t fuck this up,” he says, softly, “or I’ll really hurt you.”

Richie freezes. Like he’s gone tharn. Like he’s on the train tracks staring into the lights, like death is looking him in the face and he thinks— _Why did I come home with him?_ and _oh shit oh fuck oh fuck_ and _this is what happens to little fucking fairies_ and _I’m never going to see Eddie again._

And then, under that, not even quivering as Patrick brings his knife in close; _I deserve this_.

Patrick pulls the neck of his shirt down and presses the tip of the knife into the front of Richie’s shoulder until blood beads up around the point, and then drags it down in a thin, straight line. “One nice clean line,” he says soft, just before the train rushes past the window. The carts rattle rhythmically, shaking the air around the house as he carves in a second one and then, finally a third. He steps back as the train passes, wiping the blade on his jeans, eyes watching little drops of blood slide into the neck of his shirt from the almost delicate

|||

“For each time I’ve made you come. And we’ll call it even-steven.” Patrick grins and, in a vaguely Cowboy-Western voice: “Come back any time.”

All Richie can manage is a somewhat scandalized look. It fucking hurts, sharp like a wasp sting, and then he’s half running down the stairs with Patrick’s laughter behind him. He won’t go back. He won’t. Presses his palm hard to the scratches as he walks, trying to stem the blood. No one would go back to that shit. No one. And then he thinks— Does Eddie have the same, neat, thin cuts on him, somewhere? Pulls his jacket around him tighter and doesn’t vomit when his hand comes away crimson.


	3. xiii-xiv

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Significant references to relationship abuse, both physical and mental (NOT between richie/eddie). Please proceed with caution and heed the tags.

**xiii**

Eddie doesn’t go home for Thanksgiving. He doesn’t go to Felix’s, either. He doesn’t want to go anywhere. He doesn’t even want to have the damn dinner Beverly slaved over all morning, but he sits and pushes his food around until it looks like he’s managed more than, like, three bites of turkey and cranberry sauce. He’s not hungry. He can’t remember the last time he was hungry. Maybe— maybe before he and Richie had that fight. Before Felix had held him down and — Eddie, sometimes, can’t stand to look at himself in the mirror anymore. His bite mark has healed, been replaced by other bruises on his ankles and his biceps and his hips, but Felix doesn’t claim him anywhere visible anymore. He thinks, often, of when he’d told Richie that things were moving too fast. Faster than he had expected. He thinks, often, of vines choking out other plants. 

Most of the time he can barely breathe, now. It seems like Felix is _everywhere_ and Eddie is frightened in a way he hasn’t been since he still lived with Ma. That this will always be the way it is. The way he lives. Hollow. Unreal.

He refuses to talk to Richie until they’re sitting having dinner and Bev _makes_ him. Even then he speaks mostly to his plate, or to his wine, or to the part of the wall just above Richie's head. He’s still angry but more than that he’s sad. Numb. Like his insides have been scooped out, like it’s his guts in the pumpkin pie. Which he doesn’t eat, even though it’s his favourite. It’s too sweet, the nutmeg burns his nose and he worries that maybe he’s just allergic to it now so he pushes that away but accepts when Beverly pours him a measure of scotch.

That burns too.

For his part, Richie tells himself that he would never do this for anyone other than Bev, but in the end, he knows he’d do it for Eddie, too. That he _is_ doing it for Eddie. And, goddamn it, he knows that he would do it for Mike or Stan or Bill or Ben, who is the “only boyfriend allowed”, according to Beverly’s rules for the night. 

He’s drunk more than he should by the end of the meal, but no one’s complaining, and it helped him get the food down. Some of it he helped with, aided by caffeine, and the pounding headache he’s had all day goes away when he eats supper, and he realizes that it’s been a while since he can remember eating at all. He’s drunker, faster. He accepts the scotch anyway, because it’s the nice stuff from downstairs, and they don’t do this all the time.

And he looks at Eddie. He looks at Eddie from the corners of his eyes, and in flickers and glances. Looks at the way the candlelight colours his cheeks, and the way his eyes are impossibly dark, and the way that he doesn’t smile nearly as much as he used to and Richie thinks, suddenly, that it’s been longer than their fight, that he’s been like this.

So when Richie downs his second glass of scotch (on top of the wine) and calls him “kitten” as a joke across his plate of pumpkin pie — “Hey, pass that scotch back this way, kitten,” waving his fingers for the bottle and Eddie’s attention, always, always (and he doesn’t, he _doesn’t_ think about Patrick) he feels his stomach flip because this is something that’s _theirs_. His and Beverly’s and Eddie’s too, if he wants it.

“You’ve had two.” But Eddie’s eyes flicker up to Richie’s face, because _kitten_. He doesn’t know how he feels about it. Beverly laughs it at him a million times a day and Felix has snarled it at him _once_ during an argument. 

They always seem to be arguing these days.

But anyway, it’s different. It’s different in Richie's mouth. Makes his chest flare with hope and makes it easier to breathe . He leans across their plates to pour him a drink, and then drains his own, pours another and watches Beverly touching up her makeup while Ben ties his shoes.

He doesn’t want them to go. He doesn’t want— he doesn’t know. He doesn’t want to fight anymore. Hooks one slippered foot up to tuck underneath him and pulls his bathrobe on tighter, like he’s cold. Maybe he is. Maybe that’s why he has no appetite. Maybe that’s why he’s so _tired_.

In a way, he recognizes that, actually, he’s depressed. Remembers feeling like this after Richie left Derry, before he moved with Bev. That dull ache of nothing being physically wrong but feeling unwell anyway. He worries a piece of skin off of his lip, and doesn’t pull a face when the alcohol stings.

“Thanks,” Richie says, but it comes out so soft he might as well have just mouthed the word. And suddenly it’s hugs from Ben and Bev and the sharp press of Beverly’s fingernails against his upper arms, leaving pale little half moons beneath his shirt that tells him to play nice and then they’re gone. Richie immediately starts collecting plates to pile in the sink because he can’t just sit at the table with Eds, no matter how badly he wants to. But he’s stupid, or reckless, or desperate because as he collects wine glasses, fingers slipping into their fragile glass bowls, he touches the back of Eddie’s neck, thumb rubbing against the tension in his shoulders, and his movements stutter, safe behind him, eyes on the way the candlelight catches in his hair. He swallows.

And where Richie gulps, Eddie hisses. Half flinches, ducks his head down and bends his neck to bare the vertebrae, eyes squeezing shut before he remembers. Remembers that it’s Richie. Richie who has never - physically, on purpose, for realsies - hurt him. He folds the collar of his robe up over bruises — finger-and-thumb prints — until it’s sitting backwards over his neck. Smooths out the material and pours them both another scotch, and keeps his eyes lowered. “I don’t want to be in a fight, anymore.” Husky and childlike as he tucks himself up tighter in the chair.

Richie feels his stomach _twist_ and snatches his hand away because for a second he thinks he hurt him and then realizes he didn’t. He doesn’t see the bruises, but—.

Richie sets the wine glasses down, clinking softly on the table before dragging those fingers over his forehead, taking a shaky breath. “Yeah it fucking sucks,” he says, and then, at a loss for a moment he just looks at him, at the line of his neck. “Are you hurt?” And his voice only shakes a little. He means _Did he hurt you?_ but he doesn’t want to bring him up, like he might summon Felix here by mistake. 

“Only my ego.” Eddie doesn’t look up at him but it’s like he can _feel_ his gaze. Flattens his collar out against his neck again. “I miss you.” It would be ridiculous, in any other situation, because he’s saying I miss you to a half eaten piece of pumpkin pie. He’s saying _I miss you_ to empty plates and guttering candles and wine glasses but he just cannot bring himself to look at Richie. He can’t.

Richie exhales unsteadily, feels his throat close over, and he thinks he cries more these days than he ever did as a kid. He touches Eddie’s hair, leans down and presses a kiss to his temple and doesn’t breathe him in, as much as he wants to do it. “You want to listen to something?” he says, instead of _I miss you, too_ , instead of _I’m sorry_. “Fuck all these dishes, I’ll do them tomorrow.”

If Eddie tenses, it’s subconscious. He feels himself go tight and nervous, fingers clutching at the tablecloth, underneath where he can’t be caught. Nods. “Yes please.” And then he’s up, helping gather up the dishes so he doesn’t burst into tears there at the table. It’s all going _fine_ until he fumbles on a wine glass, shatters it on the edge of the sink.

“Oh, for _fuck’s sake_.”

“Hey,” Richie says from the table, startled by Eddie’s reaction. It’s wrong, somehow, sets his teeth on edge. There’s a rattle of serving bowls as he sets everything down again, and then he’s there beside him in the kitchen, reaching for his wrist, pulling the sharp stem of the glass from his fingers. “Did you cut yourself?”

“No.” Blinking hard at the sink. And then at Richie. Touching him. “There’s glass in the sink.” His breath catches, goes wonky, and he pulls himself very gently out of Richie's grasp to step away, wrap his arms around himself. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t—” Richie tosses the stem into the sink, “Don’t be sorry, the fuck are you sorry for?” But it’s not… that. It’s not the glass. “Eddie,” he says, voice tight. “You don’t have to be sorry,” he says, carefully.

“But I am anyway.” And his voice isn’t tight. It’s just _small_. Small in a way Eddie Kaspbrak has not been for a long time. “I’ve been a really horrible friend.” That’s what Felix says, anyway, these days. In the dead silence of night when Eddie can’t hear Richie through the wall or down in the alleyway. He doesn’t ask where he goes. It’s not his business. Felix says that too. Says he wants to go to his place, but then— Eddie doesn’t feel _safe_ with him anymore. He feels like he’s been _tricked_. That there’s more to this than he knows and— and the dark scares him. He hates being kept in the dark.

“No, I’m pretty sure that’s me,” Richie says, and then it all just starts flooding out of him. “I didn’t mean what I said about you leaving, I really didn’t— I don’t want you to go. You’re my family, man, you and Bev, I don’t want you to go anywhere. I don’t want you to move in with him, I want you to be _here_.”

“I don’t—.” His voice _cracks_ , properly, just gives up halfway through his sentence and then his shoulders start heaving and his stomach starts jumping and then he can’t stop. He’s sobbing into the heels of his hands like a toddler, hunched in on himself. “I don’t— want to— move— I— want to— stay here— W-with— you—.” And it _hurts_. It hurts his chest to cry like this, to cry like he hasn’t cried in weeks and weeks and weeks despite wanting to, resolve and self control snapping like yarn.

“Oh, no, okay, okay,” Richie says, and then he’s got his shoulders, saying softly, “Eddie, Eddie,” pulling him into his arms, “Baby, hey.” And, fuck, it slips out. He hears himself say it like an echo, far too late to pull it back. And maybe he doesn’t _want_ to. “I’m an asshole. I’m a fucking asshole, I just— I didn’t mean that shit, I take it back.”

“Y-you’re not— mean— or gross!” Between heaving breaths, arms wrapping around his neck automatically, because that’s how he hugs Richie. On his toes, face against his shoulder. He doesn’t miss the _baby_ either, clings tighter. “I was just fucking— mad at you. I hate being mad at you.”

Richie laughs, broken and unsteady and holds him back and thinks about how he _fits_ and that hurts. He thinks about how it feels _right_ to be this close to him, in spite of the fact that he has a boyfriend, in spite of the fact that he doesn’t and will never deserve Eddie. And Eddie’s face is pressed to the cuts in his shoulder and it stings, fabric catching, but he doesn’t care. He holds him there. “Okay. Thanks.” And he thinks _It doesn’t matter_. Presses his face into Eddie’s hair and says “I’m kind of gross and mean though, I mean…” Folds him up tighter, holds him so hard, thinks I love you. “Let’s just forget this. I was like having fucking nightmares about finding your room empty, man, I’m not even fucking kidding.” 

“But I _like_ it when— when you’re gross and mean.” Hiccuped, fingers tangling in the back of his head, through his curls, pressed against him so tight he can feel their heartbeats. Thumping opposite ways like they’re passing it between each other. “That’s why I’m sorry. I d-didnt— mean it like it— came out.”

Something shivers through him, and for a moment it’s Patrick Hockstetter’s voice low in his ear. He almost draws back, but doesn’t, wraps his whole forearm around the back of Eddie’s neck instead, keeping him close. “Dude, no,” he says, but it’s like he’s anticipating something — those moments where you know that the next moment is going to be so good. “Impossible.”

“B-b-but I _do_.” As his throat catches, clutches in on itself, and his stomach cramps with anxiety. “I was just so _angry_ because you weren’t telling me _anything_ and then when— and you got mad _too_ because I _heard_ — and it wasn’t even m-my fault— I wasn’t _listening_ — he _made me_.”

That takes a moment or two to absorb, and as it does, his body changes — its pliancy against Eddie — he goes tense and still, but doesn’t let him go, blinking at the kitchen cabinets over Eddie’s shoulder. “What?” he asks after a moment. 

Richie can’t breathe, but his mouth fills with saliva like he’s going to be sick. “Jesus,” he says, and pulls back. The room spins. “Ah— fuck, okay. I w—I was—” he looks back at him, breathing shallow and fast. “He did _what_ to you?” he whispers. His face is drained of blood, eyes hollow and dark in his face. “Eddie? He did what?”

“He wanted me to h-hear.” He still has one hand on Richie, on his chest, eyes downcast as he kind of clutches at his throat. Like he’s a parody of himself, rubbing his fingertips over his Adam’s apple and then up and around the back, then back again. “We were— well, we _were_. And he— shushed me and—,” he mumbles the rest, the hand over his mouth, the biting. “So it wasn’t— I wasn’t _listening for you_. It wasn’t— on-on purpose.”

And, oh, Richie is going to _fucking_ kill someone. He’s going to break something, slam his fist into the cabinets, shove the dishes on the table to the floor. He _wants_ to do that. What he does instead is wrap his fingers very carefully around Eddie’s hand on his chest and push him gently away before he walks out of the kitchen.

The bathroom door ricochets off the tub, and he doesn’t even kneel down, just hauls up the toilet lid and throws up, violently, into the bowl. It helps. Cools something in him, something that’s screaming and white-hot and violent. Vaguely, somewhere, he thinks, _sorry, Bevvie_ , because all that fucking food… 

Drops the lid down, flushes, turns on the sink. He still wants to hit something, but it’s not a certainty like it was before, that he _would_. Now he just _wants_ too, but he’s all shivery, cold sweat like a film down his back, so he won’t. It would be a shit punch anyway. 

Eddie waits two minutes, then three, then five. Runs the cold tap for a glass of water and dries his eyes on the backs of his hands before he trails after him. Sits on the closed lid of the toilet and holds out the water. He doesn’t ask if he’s okay. Pulls his knees in until they touch each other and clasps his hands against them. What can he say? There’s nothing. Not here, in this moment. He doesn’t move to touch him, either, just looks at his thumbnails in the fluorescents.

Richie sniffs, nose running. He pulls a face, taking the water from him, then brushes his teeth quickly, _hard_ and practically throws the toothbrush back into the holder where it rattles against Eddie’s and Bev’s. And Felix’s. He clenches his jaw, swishes some of the water in his mouth and spits, before he drinks some down, coughs slightly. And then he moves, gets down on his knees in front of Eddie and wraps his fingers softly around one of Eddie’s ankles. “Break up with him,” he says. “Eds.”

“— ow.” Just as careful, lifting his foot out of his grip, so that Richie is holding the ball of his heel instead. “I-I don’t know if I can, Richie—.” Blinks, down at where his leg is yellow-green with a half healed bruise, shifting away from him entirely and shaking out so that his pyjama leg falls back down. “Are you— are you okay? Do you need an antacid?”

Richie follows his gaze, finds the place again, the bruises, pushing his pyjamas up his calf to see the bruise, and looks up at him. “I can’t— I can’t do this, Eds. Why is he doing this to you?” _He wants it_ , he thinks, in Patrick’s voice. Richie pinches his nose. “Man, Eddie, what the fuck?”

“Don’t— don’t, don’t.” Shakes his head, then starts rubbing his temples, curling down over his knees so Richie can’t see how red he is. “It was fun, at first, I— it was _nice_ , you know? And it’s just— going too fast, now.” Like he’d said last time, the last time they fought. Panic rips through him, whipping his head up to stare at him. “I don’t want to fight, I don’t want to fight with you, please.”

“We’re not. We’re not fighting. Why can’t you break up? Take a— a break, just for a little while.” He swallows and then says the thing he doesn’t want to say, the thing he told himself he _wouldn’t_. “I don’t want… him doing that to you, I don’t— I don’t want _him_ to.” And it’s so close to the truth that it quivers in him, at the back of his throat.

“I just— I _can’t_.” It shakes him to the core, that second inflection. _Him_. I don’t want _him_ to. Eddie drops his hands from his face, tear-streaked, back to his knees as he gapes at him. 

_I don’t want_ him _to._

“He— he just— he doesn’t _mean_ any of it. I think— he’s just— I don’t—“ but is there a real answer? Outside of what he’s said about telling everyone about what Richie gets up to. Telling everyone who comes to the bar. Putting Bev out of business and Richie out of a job. About the people who come in here to _deal_ and how easy it would be to make something look like an accident.

Richie lets out a breath. “You can’t-you don’t want to— or you can’t-you can’t?” he asks softly, eyes searching. Slides his thumb over the thin skin on the top of Eddie’s foot, feeling tendons there, how fragile they are. Reaches up with his free hand to touch his face, wipe tears away, not quite meeting his eyes while he does it.

“I ... I cant.” After a brief pause, a moment in which he closes his eyes and allows himself this. Allows the contact and the comfort and the _Richie_ of it. His hands are warm and dry despite vomiting, and he smells like mint now. Mint and sweat and something acrid underneath that would bother Eddie on anyone else. “I can’t-cant.” Quiet, breathing slowing, face tilted to his touch.

“ ‘Kay,” Richie says softly. Drops his face to Eddie’s knee and presses his lips to the place just below it, the inside of his calf, feels it thrill through him because he _shouldn’t_. “Okay.” He nods and then climbs to his feet, sliding his thumb over Eddie’s cheek. “Let’s just— we can hang out in my room. Or I can put something on the record player in the living room, if you want. Let’s just…”

Nods, follows him up and grabs onto his hand and squeezes hard. Like that will tell him everything he needs to know. Like that translates into _I love you_ and _I’m sorry_ and _please, Richie, please_. “Your room.” Because Felix has never been in there. “Please.”

So that’s where they go. Richie closes the door but not completely, because no one’s home and he doesn’t want Eddie to feel… trapped. He gives him a selection of tapes, letting him pick what they listen to. He doesn’t turn the lights on, just plugs in the fairy lights that are draped haphazardly over the window and behind the bed. He sits on the bed, crosslegged and says “Sorry I made you cry,” like they’re twelve again. 

“Don’t be stupid.” Softly, as Radiohead starts to play, turning to look at him on the bed. Surrounded by twinkling lights. He groans, softly, rubs his hands over his face and bites down on his tongue until the desire to climb into Richie’s lap and kiss him stupid goes away. Then he climbs onto the bed, lays his head in his lap, and closes his eyes tight. “Sorry I’m such a cry baby.”

“That’s why I love you, Spaghetti,” Richie says. Easy, to say it like that. The way he’s always said it. He runs a hand through his hair, pulling the strands gently through his fingers, eyes on his face, because his eyes are closed. Because he can look at Eddie, when Eddie doesn’t know he’s looking. “Sorry I didn’t… tell you. Sorry you had to find out that way. God, that’s— that’s so fucked up.”

“I just— I told _you_.” With a deep, shuddering breath. His head moves so that there’s more, more hair to play with, more scalp to scratch over, forgetting about hiding the finger marks now. Richie knows. Why hide it? “Is he nice?”

“He’s nobody,” Richie says. “It was… not good. I didn’t… I didn’t tell _anyone_. Well, Bev. But she’s… I’m sorry… I just… sometimes I don’t want to. Want.” He breathes an empty laugh. “Anything, I guess.”

“You’re allowed to. Want things, I mean. It’s human.” Shifts until he’s facing upwards, opens his eyes to look at him. “Who was it? Do you think you’ll see him again?”

“No one,” Richie says, looking away from him a little too quickly — _caught_ looking — but then he looks back. “And I fucking hope not. I missed you, jesus. This was like, a thousand times worse than when I split up with your mom.”

He makes a joke. Eddie hears it land, distantly, because when Richie turns his head… Eddie reaches out, brow furrowed, to put his fingers on the side of his neck. Where his skin is _hot_ against Eddie’s cold, still healing. Still black and purple and fresh. “I— well, I can’t say anything, but— are you okay? Did-did this guy hurt you?”

Richie remembers too late, the mark Patrick left there. He’s been trying not to look at it in the mirror, these days. He takes his hand and presses his fingers to his mouth. Thinks _Don’t, Rich._ “Let’s not talk about this,” he says. “Shift, I want to lay down.”

Eddie bites his lip, wants to argue, but ultimately does as he’s told. Shifts, and then wriggles so that he’s under the covers. 

They used to do this all the time. When Richie first moved in. Eddie’s read countless books curled on this side of the bed with Richie pottering about or writing. “I just— you deserve better than that, okay? You do.”

“Right back at you, sunshine,” Richie says, and reaches for the button of his pants — thinks, remembers, no — there’s no marks there. He takes them off, leaves his shirt and underwear on, because Eddie is in pyjamas so. So this is what they always do. They always do this. 

Richie gets under the covers with him, facing him. He can’t quite meet his eyes, like this — he’s got Hockstetter’s words rolling back over him in waves. His eyes flicker over Eddie’s freckles, his mouth, the sharp line of his jaw. Thinks _clean lines_ and says “Do you think I’d look better without glasses?”

“No.” Immediately, mouth pulling down until he’s almost pouting, entire face going with it, confused and grouchy. “No I don’t. I like your glasses.” Of course he does. They’re part of Richie so he loves them. The same way he loves everything else about him. He sticks one hand under the pillow, elbow under his head, then tucks the other one under his cheek as he looks back at him. “D’you think I’m a bad person?”

He smiles a little at that near-pout. Christ, he’s adorable, he’s lovely. Richie closes his fingers tight in the soft blankets between them so that he doesn’t reach out to him. And then Eddie asks that and Richie’s eyes shoot up to meet his. “Why the fuck would I _ever_ think that, dude? _No_. No. Not even a little bit. Why would you say that?”

“Why would _you_ ask me if you look better sans spectacles?” It’s half deflection and half knowing that it’s the same answer for both of them. “I like your glasses. I like your whole thing that you have going on. I _wish_ I could be relaxed like you.”

“Uh, I’m not relaxed, dude, I’m like ten seconds away from spontaneous combustion at all times. My brain sounds like when you scrape a fork wrong across fancy plates, it’s fucking awful, all the time.” And he’s talking, but beneath that he’s hearing him. _I like your whole thing… I like your whole thing…_ And he reaches out to him, finally, finally. Pushes his fingers through Eddie’s hair from above his ear to the back of his neck where the marks are. He’s careful. So, so soft, thumb sliding beneath his ear. “I bet you think in full sentences. You finish one before you start another…”

“Please don’t scrape your brain.” Softly, eyelashes fluttering as he lets himself go boneless, slow when he opens again to look at him. “You’ve heard me talk when I’m upset. Sometimes I can’t even finish _words_.” The smile is small, tentative, but genuine. More genuine than he’s shown in months. Brings a hand up to press against the outside of his wrist to keep him there.

Richie takes a soft breath, going still. “D’you think I still know you?” he asks, softly. “I know I said I didn’t, but I… I think, maybe… I think I do. The way we used to, as kids. I want to. I always wanna know you. Now and like, twenty years from now, and twenty years from then… I’m a dick. Ha, get it, ‘cause…”

“I hope you do.” Eddie’s speaking quietly, mirroring tone, starting to blush across his nose. They’re just… looking at each other. Looking at each other and it’s better than any sex with Felix has ever been. More intimate. “I want you to, as well. And I want to know you. Forever and ever.” He pauses, and then laughs, fully, right into his face. “The whole Richard-Dick thing is a little overplayed, don’t you think? The name _Little Richard_ too.”

  
Richie just _lights_ up. “How dare you, I think I’m gonna change my name to Dick, actually. Maybe that’ll be my— like my standup name. Little Richard doesn’t work because my dick is huge, you wouldn’t believe it. Although, I guess it could be, like, ironic. That could be funny. I’m not answering to Richie anymore.”

“We _agreed_ your stage name would be Trashmouth, Richie, you can’t go back on that!” He swats him, very gently, on his chest. “What am I supposed to call you, then? I only call you Dick when you _deserve_ it.”

“Ow, no _hitting_ ,” He wraps an arm around his back and pulls him close, into his chest and it’s — oh, closer than he’d meant, more than he anticipated. He can feel the quick rise of Eddie’s chest against his own, the soft knock of sharp hip on hip. “Only you guys call me Trashmouth.” His voice comes out only a little unsteady. “Maybe it’d be weird if other people did. Like, strangers.”

“That did not hurt you big baby.” And he allows Richie to pull him in, hands steadied against where he’d smacked him, leaning down to press a dry kiss there. “All better, you fucking toddler.” Eddie settles in. Tucks his head in against his collar and closes his eyes, tangles their legs together. “You gonna look after me when you’re rich and famous?”

Fingers in his hair, Richie thinks about that moment with the pills Hockstetter had. How he’d thought that he could be good enough for Eds if he just had money. Money to clean himself up and take Eddie to dinner and buy him all those nice things he likes...

But here, now, with Eddie in his arms, breathing against him, Richie thinks that that’ll make him no better than Felix. All money and charm, but soulless inside. In a way that’s worse somehow, Worse than Hockstetter, with his animal skulls and his strange house by the tracks that reminds Richie, somehow, of Neibolt. (Something about the way the light falls through the blinds downstairs.) 

“No way,” he says, kissing him on the top of the head. “You’ll have it made by then, Spaghetti. And you won’t need Felix or your mom or Bev or me...” his fingers keep combing through his hair. “You’ll never be too cool for us though, hate to break it to you. You’re gonna be stuck with us Losers forever.” 

Because they’ve all always taken care of each other, in the ways it really counts. Ways Patrick and Felix and Mrs. K. Never achieved. And maybe, Richie thinks, their way was the best way. It was... time and conversations and building worlds together. The Clubhouse and the stories Bill told and Ben’s dam in the river. Movies they saw together at the Aladdin. They took care of each other with all they had, even though most of them had nothing much at all. Richie wonders if they could ever go back to that or if they’re too far past it. If they need more from one another, from life, now, as adults. Richie thinks that even if he makes it to LA — if he beats the odds stacked against him and becomes... anyone. He thinks he still wouldn’t have enough for what Eddie needs. 

And all Richie needs, he thinks, all he needs is this: to hold Eddie against him and know that they both still want to keep whatever incorporeal but real love they’ve been cultivating all this time going. A little fire that never goes out. That they can have it without putting hurt into one another’s skin just to prove it to someone else, the way they did as kids. The way the scars in their palms were theirs alone, not for their parents or their bullies or their friends. 

He wants that back. 

“I don’t think I _want_ to make it. Not like you and Bill do, anyway.” Quietly, smoothing his fingers over Richie's t-shirt, over and over. “And— it’s not always about _need_ , you know? I don’t need Felix or my mom. They’re not Losers. I need you guys.” And he ignores the way he tacks on the ‘guys’, because that’s automatic, and right now it doesn’t matter if Richie reads the real meaning into it or not.

“I used to think that we’d all live together. All seven of us, you know? And then everything would be okay. I wouldn’t be lonely anymore.” Eddie thinks he’s maybe never been more lonely than he has been these past few months. With Richie out of the house and not speaking to him properly. He swipes his thumb around, down his bicep, curls closer and huddles under his chin. “Remember when I broke my arm? Ma said you were all bad friends and I— I remember thinking there wasn’t any such thing, you know? Good and bad. There was _evil_ , because we fought it, but none of us were _evil_. We just loved each other, and that’s what was important.” He turns his head to rest it against Richie's jawline, and sighs. “There’s not really a word for ‘people who live in your heart’, but I think we got close enough with ‘Losers’.”

Richie’s distracted for a moment, with that touch, but he’s listening. Hanging onto every word like he often does, when Eddie talks. But then he lets that sit between them for a while — people who live in your heart. “I’ll live with you for as long as you want. I know it’s not all seven… hey—” he says, pushing himself up onto one elbow, looking down at him. “Come to LA with me.”

The movement knocks Eddie, moves him onto his back so that he’s laying under Richie, and he laughs. Palm still holding his arm, eyes dark and glittering with the fairy lights. “Are you asking me to run away with you?” It’s dangerously close to flirting, this. The tone of voice, what he’s saying. What he’d say if Richie said that’s what he was doing. Squeezes the muscle under his hand gently.

That slow trickle of an idea opens like floodgates in his mind now. “I’m— yeah. Eddie. Yes. I’m still saving the money, but jesus. That’s— fuck _Felix_ , he isn’t going to follow you all the way across the country. Is he? We could just— we could go. Just, start again, and figure it out together and rent a shitty apartment the size of a shoebox, with like, no windows or something. Eddie.” He takes a sharp breath.

No Hockstetter, either.

“What about the others?” But his gaze is clearing, lightening, shoulders shifting against the pillows. It feels daring, when he lifts his hand to thumb over Richie's cheek, dropping it just as quickly. _A shitty apartment the size of a shoebox. Living in each other’s pockets the way Eddie wants._ “Why would you— with me? For-for me?”

“Wh— we, I don’t know, fucking— Stanley and Mike are in fucking _Georgia_. Bill’s in fucking California, somewhere, we— if they wanna come live in the shoebox, with us they’re more than welcome, but they don’t— it’s okay if we’re not all…” But Bev, he thinks, his heart twisting a little. “Bev… Bev has Ben,” he says. “Or they can come, I don’t know. All I know is that I’m going, eventually, I have to at least try, and I want you there. I want you to come with me because you’re…” he swallows. “I dunno. I want you, I just want you.”

“You’re such a romantic.” It’s gentle teasing, his brain still catching up because this is Richie saying everything he’s wanted to hear for _years_. His hand goes to his face again, cheekbone, jaw, down his neck as he swallows. “D’you actually think we could? What would we do?” What would our lives be like, in a shoebox apartment?

His brain cuts out like a radio going static and he just looks down at him, blinks, the fairy lights reflecting in tiny flecks across his lenses. And he thinks that maybe Eddie will only come because it’s an escape, but that’s okay. That’s good enough. Maybe eventually they’ll drive each other bugshit, but they haven’t yet, living here. But then he thinks that it was Bev who made them sit down together for Thanksgiving, and it was Bill who always brought all the Losers together when it counted and maybe…

But Richie could try. He could get better at it. So yeah, he thinks they could. Everything else, the logistics, that’s superfluous.

And: “This,” he says, when he catches up.

And: 

“Okay.” Eddie says. “I don’t see how laying around in bed listening to sad bro rock will bring in money, but I trust you.” Smiling, because it’s ridiculous, Richie is ridiculous and Eddie loves him so much it hurts. And Felix probably wouldn’t follow him across the country. So he just has to be patient, just has to wait until they have the money, just has to put up with it and survive until then. “Is there more than one bed in this shoebox or…?”

Richie’s starting to smile, but half his mind is still running, figuring out exactly how this could work. “Uh, bed— we could have bunk beds,” he says. “I call bottom.” (Patrick over him and _You’ve done this, haven’t you?_ Jesus it’s like a PTSD flashback.) “Mind out of the gutter, Kaspbrak. It’s just ‘cause you’re little, we’ll slot you up against the ceiling like a suitcase on an airplane.”

“I’m _fun sized_ and _convenient_. There’s always room for Edward Kaspbrak.” But he gives him a kick for good measure. “That would work for me. Less chance of being crushed under you when you inevitably break the slats.”

He laughs, drawing away to lay back on the pillows again, chest still shaking with it. “Dude, what are you saying? I’m sorry I’m no _communion wafer_ like you are, I can practically _see_ through you.”

The giggles overtake him, like they always do when he’s been sad and Richie is _Richie_ at him, rolling with him so that his arms are pillowed across his chest and he can rest his chin on them. “No, not— I’m not _saying_ anything, you just grew into your bones, you know? I got a bit taller but that’s it, really.” But it’s… it’s a good thing. Richie's body makes him feel /safe/ in its soft parts, how solid he is, how warm. Richie is beautiful, in a weird rangy kind of way. Eddie sighs and smiles down at him. “Wouldn’t change a single thing about you, though, Trashmouth.”

“Actually, I think I just learned what to do with my arms,” he says, even as his breath stutters beneath Eddie’s touch. “Like how to move them?” _Wouldn’t change a single thing about you._

So: “Me too, Eds,” he says, and then, looking at the lights instead of at Eddie. “You’re basically perfect, so.” _So you’re going to fucking kill me_. And then he thinks, weirdly, in a playground voice: _If you like it so much, why don’t you marry it?_ He thinks that Eddie must like him in a way that’s different from how he likes Felix. At least in the first place. _He means_ , Richie thinks, _as a friend. That’s what he means._ But that’s okay. That’s— that’s enough. He can make it be enough. He can. He can…

_Until Eds finds someone else. It’s not like there’s not other people in Los Angeles._

Oh. It makes Eddie flush, all the way from his brow down his neck and across his chest, grinning dopily when he buries his face into his arms.

“You’re just saying that because you feel bad about us fighting.” Mumbled, pleased, cheeks practically burning holes through Richie's shirt. “I’m too short and thin to be perfect. Think about it. A _communion wafer_ isn’t a full meal, is it?”

“I mean, it _could_ be, if some Pope somewhere didn’t declare one tiny little sliver of it for everyone, like— it’s supposed to be fuckin’ _bread_ isn’t it? Wasn’t that the whole point in the fucking Bible? Making genuine, like, sustenance from bread and wine? It’s meant to be all life-giving and sacrificing or some shit. It’s only not a meal if you keep dividing it up into smaller and smaller parts. Like… I mean, I think that’s more about corruption in the Catholic church than… than anything else. What were we talking about? Oh, right. Nah, you’re like a loaf.” He snorts, chuckling up at the ceiling.

“And you’re a fucking idiot.” But it’s said so gently, so fondly, reaching up to brush Richie's curls away from his forehead as he settles against him properly. Rests his head back against his shoulder and shuts his eyes with his face still pink. “So. LA?”

“Yup,” he says, getting his arm around him. “LA.” Running his thumb softly over Eddie’s arm through his pyjamas. “You’ll really come with me? Not just saying it ‘cause we’ve just been in a fight?”

“No, Richie.” Lifting his head again, just a little, one eye opening to squint at him. “All I ever wanted when we were growing up was to live with you.” Guys he forgets to add. Drops his head again and lets the motion of Richie holding him bring them closer. Puts his hand over where he can feel his heart beating. “If LA is where you’re going, LA is where I’m going too.”

Richie has to swallow twice, sure Eddie can hear it, sure he can feel the crazy way his heart is beating. The silence seems to stretch out and out between them, and he’s sure he’s the only one who can hear the way it’s actually screaming, tightening around his chest and throat until he _has_ to break it before the weight of it crushes him (he’s sure other people don’t think like this). “That’s gay,” he says, softly, aiming for a joke and just… praying it lands.

“Oh, pot-kettle, Tozier.” Balls the hand on his chest up into a fist, then flicks his nipple hard. “ _Run away to LA with me, you’re perfect Eddie, we can just lay in bed all the time in LA_ , fuck off.” Grinning through it, pressing his face firmer into the side of his ribcage. “Also, asshole, obviously it’s gay. _I’m_ gay. So everything I say and do has queer subtext.”

Richie yelps, curling his legs up for protection, jostling them both. “Ouch, jesus!” and he’s trying not to think about queer subtext until he realizes he already is thinking about it, and “Actually, I think I have more queer subtext, since I’m uh, a secret gay.” Yes, god, yes, he’s said it. He does his best not to exhale relief. It’s not like Eddie hasn’t guessed, right? “I’m definitely— definitely subtextier.” 

He snorts, then giggles, then has to bury his face in Richie's chest as he just _laughs and laughs_. Gets his arms around him and holds on tight. “That’s okay—.” He sputters, trying to calm himself. “Subtext is sexy, right? No one wants it rubbed in their faces.” He takes a deep breath and then smooths his hand over the nipple he’d flicked; “Sorry, did it actually hurt?”

God, fuck, the relief that washes over him is ridiculous, it’s like a high. It’s better than weed, better than the good scotch, it’s fucking worlds better than E. “Um, yeah, those are _sensitive_. I’m a sensitive guy,” and then he’s laughing again, reaching for Eddie’s wrist to hold him still because fuck, no, that’s not— he can’t handle Eddie doing that, in his bed. “Are you feeling me up, Kaspbrak?”

“ _Obviously_.” Dryly, because this is how he can hide that yes, yes that is what he’s doing. Richie holds his wrist but not his fingers, and he grins, pressing down and making grabbing motions over his flesh. “How could I _possibly resist_ now I know you’re into dudes? I’m obviously an uncontrollable horn dog.”

Richie shouts, flailing beneath him, Eddie’s fingers grazing the still-healing lines on his shoulder. He hisses softly and then figures this out — grabs Eddie by his upper arm and pushes, scrambling so that he’s over him, pinning the wrist he’s trapped to the pillow beside his head, fingers searching for his other hand to pin that, too. “I do _not_ trust you at all, you little shit,” but he’s laughing, breathless. His face is flushed, he can feel it. His shoulder stings and stings, but he’s looking down at Eddie so he barely even feels it.

What starts as gleeful giggling immediately fades out into a gasp when he’s pinned, skin suddenly hypersensitive, Richie's grip burning and real around his wrists. He goes red to match the blood flaring in Richie's cheeks, pupils blowing as his eyes glaze over and he just _stares_ up at him. “That’s unfair,” and it’s throaty, so he clears it softly. “I trust _you_.”

“Yeah?” he asks him, watching him, watching his face change, the flush, the dark change in Eddie's eyes. “Really?” And he thinks _‘Cause I could do things to you_ ; thinks _I know what you like_ , but what if Patrick was a fucking liar? Thinks _make him forget everyone’s name but yours._ He licks his lower lip, brow slightly furrowed.

Eddie’s breath stutters in his chest while his brain fucking _explodes_. Nods, a little, manages a squeaky little ‘uh huh’ as he looks up at him. Meets his eyes and sees it there too. The desire. Presses himself back into the mattress and, as always, mirrors him. Licks his lips and then pulls them in to hold them between his teeth. Of course he trusts Richie. He always has. At this point he isn’t sure there’s anything in the whole world which would change that. And maybe ‘uh huh’ isn’t enough. Isn’t enough to convey that. “Yeah. I trust you.”

He takes a breath and says, softly, “Eddie…” and thinks a thousand things. A thousand things he wants to say, a thousand he wants to do. He wants to kiss him, more than he’s ever wanted to do anything in his life. He holds his wrists and strokes the soft skin there. He thinks he could shift his hips down, but maybe — fuck, maybe he’s reading this all wrong. 

Eddie makes this noise in response, and he tries to form it into Richie's name and fails spectacularly. He just goes ‘mmmbghnnghm?’ Because his mind is entirely taken up with the feeling of Richie's thumbs against the fluttering pulses in his wrists. How it makes him shiver and tremble like a teenager, like a virgin, breathing quick but even. Bends his hands backwards so that the bones in his forearm press upwards into that light, tickling pressure; blinks slow and content. Like a cat. Like a _kitten_. He bites his lips together harder.

Richie breathes a soft laugh and then says, “Listen, I—” The tape ends, snapping off and Richie flinches. In the silence that follows he has two options, and he takes the coward’s way out. Because he is one, because what if he’s wrong? God, what if he’s wrong? He pulls away from him to turn the tape over in the deck, his heart beating so hard it hurts.

In the handful of time that he has, Eddie pushes himself backwards to sit against the headboard and pulls the covers over his hips, eyes wide and face red like he’s already been fucked, breathing like he already has been. Watches Richie change the tape and squeezes his thighs together as hard as he can, until it hurts, until _he’s_ not hard anymore. Fists his hands in the covers and draws his legs up to his chest. “Sorry, Rich.” Softly.

“Why?” he asks, looking back, fingers hovering over play, but not pressing down. He’s sort of huddled near the other end of the bed, his long cricket limbs, legs bare. He’s got one pulled up to his chest, hiding anything that’s going on because he’s just wearing underwear and his t-shirt, and so it’s blatantly obvious and he hates himself, suddenly, and doesn’t know why. Glancing at him he says: “Don’t be sorry, just… changing the music. Do you still want…?”

Nods, slowly, and then quickly, because he’s unsure about what Richie is asking _still want?_ about, but it doesn’t matter. He still wants to be here in this room with him. He still wants to be listening to music with him. He still wants to be trapped, safe, under the weight of him. “Yeah. I— should we— more scotch? Maybe some pie?”

“Okay,” he says, voice tight. “Yeah, sure, I’ll just get this going…” like pressing play on a tape is somehow a difficult and time-consuming endeavour. 

Eddie nods, but makes no move to get up. Wraps his own fingers around his wrists instead, crossing them over each other and squeezing until the ghost of Richie's hands is committed into his memory. And he’s still, maybe, a little—. “I can’t get up.” Shyly, dropping his eyes down and away.

Richie looks at him again, sort of incredulous, storms gathering behind his eyes. “Oh-kay,” he sort of laughs, and his teeth want to chatter so he grits them together. “Mm… well this is awkward,” he points out, still not budging — only moves to drag a hand through his hair, making it crazy. 

Eddie says “Jesus.” and tips his head back against the headboard for a moment. And then he sighs, hard, through his nose before he bites the bullet and gets up, covering his half-hard dick with one hand and striding out of the room. “You’ve got ten minutes to— whatever.” Because he’s going to do the same thing. The bathroom door all but slams shut behind him.

This— is this really what he’s fucking going to do? This is really what he’s fucking doing now, is it? This? He’s going to sit here and shame his hard-on away while Eddie— fucking— _Eddie_.

 _You’re better than this, Rich_ , and he doesn’t know if he means for what he’s just done or what he wants to do, but he leaps off the bed, and follows him out, knocking twice on the bathroom door with the side of his fist and his heart in his throat before he pushes it open.

The answering yelp is guilty and panicked, ripping his hand out of his pyjamas as the door opens, grabbing at the hand towels like they’ll cover him and stop Richie from seeing what— He’d just pinned him to the bed. He’d just _pinned_ him and that had been enough to have him bouncing back like a fucking— like he’s sixteen again and they’ve spent the afternoon wrestling in the clubhouse. “Richie—!” He’d fucking said ten minutes. He’d _said_.

Richie registers the movement, the flash of his hand from the waistband of his pyjamas and Richie — jesus, what the fuck, just in his underwear — kind of groans and catches Eddie’s face in his hands and he — god, he fucking kisses him. Makes this embarrassing, desperate noise against his mouth and _holds on_ fingers in his hair, because _please, Eddie, please, please._

And god, _god_ , Eddie just falls apart. Breath stuttering as he kisses back, opens his mouth against Richie's for his tongue, body going fluid in his grip. Hooks his arms up around his neck and whines, lips wet when they catch, moving like he’s trying to eat him whole; fingers clasping into his hair too, so that he can’t pull away, so he doesn’t fucking run from this again. The force of it knocks him back against the sink, all of their toothbrushes clattering to the tile, his straight razor skittering away between their feet.

But Richie has no fucking intention of running. He presses against him bodily, steps as close as he possibly can and it’s not close enough. “Eddie, Eddie,” he whispers into the kiss, into his mouth, Eddie’s mouth, soft and warm and wet, tasting vaguely of honey and smoke — scotch. Richie sucks it from his tongue, pulling him forward, fingers digging into his skull behind his ears.

“ _Richie_.” Almost silent like when Richie had thanked him earlier, licking up into his mouth and over his teeth while Richie sucks on his tongue, hands lowering over his shoulders and throat vibrating with a low, animalistic moan. He can’t get the leverage that he wants, can’t get tall enough on his tiptoes, can’t get close enough. “Pick me up— can— can you lift me?”

He doesn’t fucking need to be told twice, just does it, pulling him up against him, sitting him half on the edge of the bathroom sink, half in his arms, “Christ,” he says, as Eddie’s legs come up around his waist, fingers digging into the soft flesh of his ass, the back of his thigh. “Ah— god—”

“Ah—“ whined and a little broken, thighs going tight around him, grinding against him through their clothes. “Ah, Richie, _please_.” As his hips shift upwards, the lines of their dicks sliding together. “ _Fuck_.” It would be so embarrassing to come like this, but he _could_. He could come just from the kisses, from the feel of Richie between his legs, and his head tilts backwards to knock against the medicine cabinet, pulling him closer.

“Eds—” matching his movements, fingers tight. He braces him on the sink, one hand still clutching his thigh, the other going to the back of his neck, pulling their mouths back together. He thinks _are we drunk? Are we too drunk?_ moaning as they slide against one another. Against his lips, muffled, “Oh god, baby, what— what do you want? I’ll fucking do anything.”

And that forces another frantic little noise from Eddie, fingers pulling at his shirt, pulling Richie right up against him as he laps into his mouth, sucks his bottom lip between his teeth, jaw shaking when he bites down gently. “I like it when you call me stuff.” Very coherent, dragging his mouth from Richie's and along his cheek, nipping at his earlobe and panting against it. “I want _more_.”

Richie laughs, sharp and wild. “You wanna—“ against his jawline, against his neck. “Take this somewhere else. Stuff? Hot stuff? Star stuff?” kissing his way down to his collarbone? “How’s that?” 

Oh, fucker. Eddie kicks him with his heel in the small of his back, pulls away from him with that same grumpy expression on his face, except now it’s paired with a high flush and dark freckles. “Like _baby_ , you moron. And— the other stuff. Not literal _stuff_. _Must_ you constantly ruin my buzz?” But then he’s dragging him back in, nodding. “Yeah, yeah, let’s— your room, not mine, okay? Not where— not— please—.”

That thrills through Richie in a fierce, reckless way. _Not where—_ Kissing him, looping his arms beneath Eddie’s thighs as he presses close. “Hang on, star stuff,” he grins against his mouth, because it’s not _baby_ but he likes it anyway. It reminds him of the freckles on Eddie’s cheeks, the light in his eyes. He picks him up, finding his balance. “You’re heavier than a communion wafer,” stepping back and knocking into the door. He holds him tighter, still half kissing him, half trying to navigate their cramped hallway. He finds his bedroom, backs the door closed and leans against it. He doesn’t know why he doesn’t take him to the bed. Maybe he’s scared, maybe just overwhelmed. Murmurs “Okay,” and sets him down, pulling him into him, Richie’s shoulders braced against the door. 

Eddie stumbles, just a little, just barely when he’s set down, wanting to tell him off. Wanting to yell at him, because _of course_ he’s heavier than a fucking wafer, but then he doesn’t. He doesn’t do any of that. Instead he leans up on his toes to kiss the bruise on his neck tenderly, pushes him back against the door and licks his chin before he drops to his knees and braces his hands against his thighs. “Do you want me to—? Can I?”

Richie doesn’t know what’s happening for a second as Eddie’s shoulders slide out of his hands and then he thinks he fucking blacks out. “Oh—” he says, staring down at him, “Oh my god, what the fuck?” One hand card softly through Eddie’s hair. “Is this a dream?” he asks, voice cracking. It’s so stupid. _He’s_ stupid. He also can’t fucking believe that any of this is happening. Everything that happened in the alley, everything that happened in that house by the railroad tracks made sense, felt real. This… somehow, this doesn’t. 

Eddie doesn’t answer. Instead what he does is get comfortable with his legs folded under him, his hands resting on his own thighs as he leans forward and opens his mouth against the bulge of his cock in his boxers; moves to one side to nose along his hipbone, the inside of his thigh, down to breathe over where he knows his balls are. “Please? I want to taste you. That’s what I want.”

“Jesus _fuck_ , Eddie, okay,” breathes it out in a rush, head knocking back against the door, free hand pressing against the door until his fingernails turn white. He looks quickly back down again, not wanting to miss a moment. “Please, god, I want you to, oh my god—” He thinks _beep beep, Richie_. His heart is racing. So hard it hurts. He keeps his fingers gentle in Eddie’s hair. 

Eddie lights up like Richie does when he gets off a good one, boosting up on his knees to push his shirt up and kiss over his stomach, all tongue and teeth and keening little sighs as he hooks his fingers into his waistband and pulls until they’re at his knees. Kisses all the way down to his hipbone, dips his tongue into the hollow there and then pulls it across the length of his abdomen to wrap his mouth around the head of his dick and lick _that_ instead with another one of those tiny mewls. Pulls away to smile up at him through his eyelashes. “How do you get anything done with _this_ between your legs? I’d just be jerking off all the time.” Licks a hot stripe up the length of him because, god, there’s so much. “No one needs a dick this big, Dick.” Takes him back into his mouth and sucks, gentle at first and then harder as he bobs his head down.

Patrick’s voice is in Richie’s head again; _your dick is bigger than his_ and he squeezes his eyes shut to push it out, even though something flares hotly through his ribs because he’s bigger than Felix. That makes him feel good, in a stupid, completely bullshit masculine way. Doesn’t mean he doesn’t get off on it a little. He groans, fingers fluttering helplessly over Eddie’s hair. “God, fuck, baby, god, yes,” and he’s just whispering nonsense. Where’s all this when Patrick jerks him off. Richie just goes dead silent then, goes hollow inside. This is different. This lights him up. He feels alive in a way he hasn’t in weeks, months — since Felix came into their lives. “I think about this all the time,” he says, not able to catch it before it tumbles from his lips. “With you, fuck, it’s always—”

Eddie’s answering whine is muffled against his public hair as he swallows him down in one motion, one hand coming up to flatten over his chest, then fist in his shirt as he breathes through his nose and swallows again. Pulls back, and then down again, saliva pooling in the corners of his mouth and running down his chin as he flicks his eyes up. Takes in his _face_ and whimpers, his other hand dropping to palm himself through his pyjamas. “I think about you when I’m with him.” Low and dick-raw against the heat of his skin, tongue flat when he runs it along the underside of his cock. “All the time. _Every_ time. I wanted you to— I wanted— to make you _jealous_. I wanted to be _yours_.”

His stomach flips, and his fingers go tight in Eddie’s hair and he thinks _Oh, this is just… this is just sex talk._ Because that’s impossible, it’s fucking impossible. He goes quiet suddenly, even though his eyes are still fixed on him. He’s going to burn this into his memory and hold onto it forever… When Eddie goes back to Felix, and— _but LA_ , his brain chips in. _He said he’d go with you_. But maybe he’ll need it when Eddie… when he finds someone else in LA… right? Richie will need this… when he fucking wakes up in the morning… I’m dreaming he thinks, but he’s not because it feels real, and the guttural moan pulled from him as his knees go weak proves that. “We— fuck!… we’re—”

“Mmnn?” In what Eddie hopes is an encouraging noise, hand trailing from his chest to wrap around the length of him and pull a little. It’s easier with him spit slick. Flattens his tongue against the head and then points it to lick into the slit at the tip, still moving his hand when he leans back to look at him, still pressing the other against his own cock. “How— how much do you have saved? How long—?” _How long will I have to pretend, to keep you safe?_ He swipes his thumb around him, smears precome over it and keeps his palm around him as he leans in and licks the sheen from his finger and the end of his dick.

“Uhn! Jesus, Eddie— Uh— six— six thousand. I dunno how l— how long.” He looks down at him, fingers shaking as he reaches down to cup his jaw. “God, you’re so fucking good, you’re gonna kill me.”

So Eddie keeps licking him, keeps moving his hand, keeps swallowing when his mouth fills with precome and spit, adding and subtracting in his head as he goes. Dips his head down to mouth at his balls, to press his nose into the crease between them and his dick. “Okay—,” sucks one into his mouth, tongues at it slowly, then pulls back with an obscene pop, “okay, so, a few more months? If I— if I start, too? I can— oh, fuck—.” He does it again, moaning low in his chest as he moves.

“Areyoustilldoingmath?” Richie gasps, and then reaches, fists his hand in the fabric over Eddie’s shoulder, “Stop, I can’t— concentrate. Are we drunk?” Desperate, vulnerable. “Eds? I mean, you’re doing math, are we— should we do this?” Too late, Tozier, he thinks, _He’s already had your cock and balls in his mouth._ Eyes on Eddie’s hand between his legs. “Stop, I wanna make you come.”

“I can _multitask_. Believe me the thought of it just being us is more than enough to get me off.” And he doesn’t stop. Just opens his mouth over him again and slides down, mindful of his teeth, fingers grasping over Richie's at his shoulder and then pulling them into his hair before returning to the base of his dick. 

Richie groans, tilting his hips so gently into his mouth, fingers curling tight then tighter into his hair. “ _Oh_ my god,” and something flickers through the back of his mind — _he doesn’t want you to touch him_ , as the same time as he hears how Eddie wants it to be just them, that he could get off on it. And it’s too much to deal with right now. Tips his hips forward again, “Please,” he breathes. “Eddie, you’re so good, you’re so goddamn fucking— beautiful, ah! Eds—” hisses softly.

And Eddie goes fucking _limp_ for a moment, letting the praise wash over him, letting Richie think he’s beautiful, letting _himself_ believe it as he looks up at him again, wants to meet his eyes, wants him to see when he opens his mouth wide and just rubs his tongue against him. Wants him to see the water clinging to his lashes, the way his hair is sweat curled and plastered to his forehead, how hard he is for him. How much he loves him. How much he always has and still will tomorrow, when this is over and he has to go back to an act which makes him feel physically ill.

Richie loses his breath. Goosebumps erupt over his skin. And this is so much better, it’s a million times better than anything he’s done before — man or not. It’s perfect, like he always knew it would be. It’s fucking perfect. “I—” strokes his face, thumb tugging at the thin skin beneath Eddie’s eye, brushing tears from his lashes. “I— do you want me to come? Can I come in your mouth?”

Eddie tries, and fails, not to nod too eagerly. That’s embarrassing. Lathes his tongue out again and wraps his hand around him to jerk him off against his parted lips, crooning in the back of his throat. “I want you to.” Before he tips his head back and opens his mouth as wide as he can.

Richie’s lungs makes this breathy sound like he’s been fucking kicked in the stomach, air rushing out of him all at once, and he tangles both hands in Eddie’s hair. “Ah, oh god, fuck, just like that, fuck, Eddie— Eds—” and it dissolves into aborted little moans, all tangled up in his throat as he goes so tense it hurts, and then he’s coming, watches as there’s one white lash of it against the flush of Eddie’s cheek, as it rushes white over the soft pink of Eddie’s tongue. His fingers curl through the soft curls of Eddie’s hair as he cries out, spine arching, curling over him, panting raggedly.

“Oh my _god_.” Soft, with his eyes closed initially, blinking open when it’s over and there’s no risk of pinkeye. Eddie swallows, licks his lips, swallows again and sits back on his heels to smile up at him. To pull him down to sit on the floor with him, taking his hand and using Richie's long fingers, broad palm to wipe the come from his cheek, tongue flicking out again to clean them when he’s done. Leans forward until he can rest his cheek against his collar and sighs. “Are you okay?”

Still breathless, desire still coursing dully through him like the edges of a prairie fire, he nods and turns his face into Eddie’s hair. “I thought you’d want it differently,” he says, soft, tentative. “Hey… did you finish?” fingers sliding down his side to his hip. “Here—” he says, pulling away gently to look at him.

“How did you think I’d want it?” Nowhere near as frantic now that he’s gotten Richie off, pleasure rolling through his veins like the come down from the beat orgasm of his life, still hard when Richie finds him. “I didn’t— you said you wanted to— so—.” Soft and a little shy, meeting his gaze for a second before he smiles and looks down again.

Pupils wide and dark — like Richie’s fucking stoned, he meets Eddie’s eyes. He almost feels like he is stoned — the good kind, the pot Bev gets. “I dunno, I thought… you’d want it rougher, or something,” he whispers it, almost ashamed. “ ‘Cause of the marks.”

Cause of what Patrick said.

He strokes his fingertips lightly over the shape of him through his pyjamas, eyes on the carpet of his bedroom. “I dunno, I could’ve— if you wanted, I…“

“Oh. W-well, I do— I do um, like it rough. But I— I also like you, so.” Nervous, suddenly, spreading his legs and turning his head to mouth kisses onto his face. “Do you— do you want to be rough with me?” Softly, silk against his ear. “I want you to be. But when you are I want it to be just you. Just your marks on me. No one else’s.”

“Cause you don’t want your boyfriend to see,” Richie says, mouth against his ear. “Right?” He nods. And it’s not manipulative, it’s not sly, it’s that he understands why. Why Felix can’t see it.

“N-no, dummy, that's _not_ right.” But he’s gasping, lifting his hips into his hand and growling in the back of his throat, clenching his teeth. “— because when we— when _you_ — I don’t want _him_ on me, still. I just want _you_.” 

_Oh god_ , he thinks, _oh god_. “What do you want me to do now?” Richie asks, flat of his palm stroking from the head of his cock to his balls through his pants. Pressing a kiss to his shoulder. “I’ll do anything,”

Eddie brings his hands up to cup his face between them, knock their foreheads together, to make him see that he means it. “I want you to make me feel like I’m yours, Richie.”

Richie squeezes his eyes shut because it’s too much to look at him. “Why?” he whispers. Because how the fuck could it possibly be _him_? Over everyone else? How could it be him? “Eddie,” he says, and then he kisses him instead of waiting for an answer. Because a moment more and he’s going to cry. He pushes him down onto the carpet and leans over him, still working his hand over him through his pants. “What do you want, baby? Let me give it to you, let me make you feel good.”

“Because—“ the _I love you_ is swallowed between their mouths, as he’s pushed back onto the floor, as he finds himself under Richie again with his hips lifting into his touch. “Richie— Richie, fuck, Richie— I’m already getting what I want. You’re— you’re _touching me_.” His hands scramble for purchase, catch in his shirt, pull until they’re laying together again and he can hook a leg over Richie's hips. “I want to be close. I want to be with you.”

Richie nods, tears in his eyes, and that’s embarrassing, so he presses his face into Eddie’s shoulder, pulls his boxers back up, then slides his hand beneath the waistband of Eddie’s pants and slicks precome over him, stroking him off slow and gentle. He thinks _I’ve wanted this since I was a teenager_ thinks _Didn’t you see the way I looked at you in the Clubhouse all those summers?_ Instead of saying it, though, he kisses him on the shoulder, on the neck, takes the lobe of his ear into his mouth and sucks gently and thinks _this is real_ , but it still feels so fucking crazy. Finds his mouth again and kisses him, open and desperate.

Eddie’s moan is lost in a similar way between them, hands falling to get his pyjamas off, then wrapping around the back of his head to kiss him and kiss him and kiss him, fingers digging into his scalp as he shudders and sighs, as he pulls his head back to lick at his throat, to bite down gently against the bruise on his neck. “Richie—.” So quiet, now. Intimate, murmured against his mouth over the sounds of skin on skin, over the stick of liquid between them. Eddie can see _now_. He sees it now and he feels fucking _stupid_. “I should have— ahh, fuck, sweetheart— oh _fuck_ you’re good at that, Jesus—.”

Richie groans, and then “Yeah?” voice soft and uncertain, pleading for more of that. Thinks _sweetheart_. Thinks _I’ll fucking die without this_. He doesn’t move faster, doesn’t change what he’s doing because Eddie _likes_ it. He licks his mouth, behind his teeth, licks over his tongue and bites down on his lower lip and thinks that he can’t believe he ever, ever went to anyone else.

“Mm.” Nodded as they kiss, as Eddie surges his hips forward, bends his knee to bring them flush together. “Yeah. Yes. Oh my god, yes.” Against his mouth, the side of his nose, one hand on the back of his neck as he moves like he’s riding him, rolling his body into his hand. “So, so good, jesus _christ_ , Richie.”

And then he realises that he’s hit something, there. A nerve. Something to poke at. Runs his tongue over Richie's bottom lip and grins. “You felt good in my mouth, t-too— _fuck_ — so _hard_ for me—.”

Goosebumps, again, as Richie shivers, bodily. “I’ve thought about you,” he says — has he said that already? He can’t remember. “I’ve wanted you for— fucking forever— I thought about you in the alley,” thumb sliding over the head of his cock, god he’s so fucking— “Jesus, you’re so wet, fuck. I was thinking— thinking about you, I couldn’t stop it.”

“Haa—“ with a tremor to match Richie's, hauling him closer, rubbing their noses together. “Yeah? What did you think? I thought about you— I _think_ about you— I’ve _been_ thinking about you since we were like, sixteen, sweetheart. Bev— ask Bev, she knows, oh _fuck_ oh _fuck_.” Sobbing, a little, because one hip is starting to get carpet burn but it still feels too good to be true.

Richie makes this helpless sound, bites down so, so gently into Eddie’s shoulder, through his pyjama top that it doesn’t even leave a white mark. Pulls back to whisper in his ear “I just wanted it to be you, I always have. I wanted— wanted” his breath escapes him in something sharp and sob-like “I wanted to suck you off, I wanted to be— inside. And you saying my name—”

It breaks something in him. Something under his ribs cracks and he _hears_ it, so he pushes Richie away as gently as he can. Untangles their limbs and sits up, pulls at him until they’re both standing up again, and he can kiss him, up on his toes. “ _Richie_.” Gentle and awed, pressing the length of his dick against his hip. “It’s alright. It’s okay. I— lay me down.” He can’t help being bossy, maybe. “Lay me down and do what you want. I want it. I want your mouth.”

Richie nods again because he doesn’t trust himself to speak, pulls him against him and presses his face into his hair until his eyes aren’t wet, swallowing damply, fingers tight in his hair so he can’t pull back, can’t see him being stupid and crying. And he lays him down, like Eddie wants, spreads out over him on the bed and kisses his mouth and down his jaw, down his neck, takes the hem of his pyjama shirt and says “Can I?”

His nod is a little reluctant, eyebrows knitting together as he lifts his arms over his head. “Don’t— don’t say anything.” Turning his eyes on him, big and brown and shining in the lights. His torso, once Richie's gotten his shirt off, is littered with bruises. Mostly small, finger and thumb prints, a larger handprint on one side of his ribs, a dark mouth-mark just below one of his nipples. “Please. Don’t. Just— I know. I know it’s not good but I thought— I thought it was just him who—.” He knows he’s wrong, now. Pulls at Richie until he can kiss him again.

Richie makes a sound like a squeak, soft and high in his throat as he’s kissed, but he doesn’t say anything, even as something burns hotly in his chest. He kisses him for a long time, fingers trailing softly over Eddie’s ribs, gentle. When he moves down, he presses his mouth to the most visible bruises, pressing kisses, invisible, over the marks Felix made, reclaiming him, trying to fix… everything. He puts his mouth over the mark below Eddie’s nipple and licks softly over it. Licks his nipple. Kisses down his stomach but doesn’t make any marks of his own. He leaves bits of himself over him like a ghost — saliva — lips and tongue. Kisses his hip, presses his tongue, open-mouthed over the pulse there, breathing warm against him. Hooks his pants down to his knees and kisses up the length of his cock, lips pulling away red, thin clear strands of precome trailing from the head of his dick to Richie’s lower lip. He flicks his tongue out, looks up at him over the lenses of his glasses, then takes him into his mouth and _groans_ around him.

“Ohh—.” It rises out of him like a note, long and wavering, revelling in the damp invisible-ink promises Richie has left on him, melting back into the pillows as his eyes go so dark it’s impossible to tell where pupil ends and iris begins, as they glaze and widen and his mouth goes slack with the moan. “Oh, holy _shit_ , Richie—,” and then he remembers, remembers what Richie _wants_. What he _likes_. His fingers tangle in his hair, holding him so gently while his name spills and rolls and bubbles and arcs out of his lips over and over and over, thighs trembling beneath him.

Richie never— fucking never wants to leave this moment. Richie reaches up, tangles his fingers with Eddie’s into his hair and pushes his own head down, harder, deeper, just to show him _you can_. He takes him all the way to the back of his throat, and it’s so easy to relax around him. It’s different— from before, but that’s a distant memory now. Now, it’s just him and Eds and the lights and the sound of their breathing. He’s holding the base of his cock with one hand, the other curled around Eddie’s hip, sliding over the heat in Eddie’s belly, sliding up his chest to his nipple, fingers circling, wanting, desperate to find out what he likes — imprint it in his memory forever.

When Eddie cries out it’s loud and harsh, like a wail, fingers tight in Richie’s hair as he moves his hips up into that molten softness, shuddering and half squealing when he brushes his nipples - because Eddie is sensitive there, too — twists his other hand in the pillows and figures out what Richie is trying to do. “I— oh, fuck, Richie, Richie, Felix _never_ oh my god oh my fucking _god_.” He swallows, thrashes his head back and forth and groans, remembers what he was saying; “The backs of my knees are— are sensitive and— my wrists and— oh, fuck, Richie, my ankles they— please—.”

Richie grins, faint scrape of teeth, light, a whine of apology, hollowing his cheeks around him as he runs his palm down the back of his thigh to the inside of his knee, fingers soft against the impossibly soft skin there, the slight dampness. Pulls his fingers down the muscle of his calf, kneading softly and gently, slides his fingers along the inside of his tendon as he takes him all the way to the back of his throat again.

_What kind of queer are you?_

And Richie thinks _this kind, this._

And Eddie doesn’t wail this time. If anything it quiets him, breath coming in soft little ‘ha’s as he relaxes entirely under Richie's hands, his eyes lidded and fixed on the top of his head as he pants. “You’re so _good_ Richie. You’re so good to me, I don’t deserve you, you’re so p-patient— ha, fuck, oh—“ brings the fingers in his hair around to his ear to stroke his thumb along the cartilage. “I— the teeth, the hint was— ahh, _Richie_ — good—.”

Richie hums against him at that touch, pulling off to drag his tongue along his slit before he takes him all the way back into his mouth, pace slow and leisurely. He doesn’t want to rush this — not like… he wants it to be good, fuck, he wants to give Eddie something to _hold onto_ if what he’s saying is true. If he’s thinking about Richie while Felix fucks him, he wants him to have this; something that’s about Eddie, only, about his wants, about what makes him feel good. 

“Oh, Richie…” sighed and slow, head thumping softly when it hits the pillows, his fingertips grazing over the top of his head as the leg in his grip goes taut like a dancer’s. His ankle rolls, toes flexing to a point as he shakes under him. “Richie, I’m— oh my god, Richie—.” Where his legs tense the rest of his body softens, going fluid over the sheets. “Oh _sweetheart_ your _mouth_ , holy shit—“ still quiet, high and quavering.

Christ, he’s so fucking beautiful. Richie can feel him, in his mouth, in his hair, all around him. And Eddie’s _voice_ saying his name. He can see them, too, as if from somewhere else. See the lines of his body, gorgeous and perfect. Eddie’s always complaining about the way he looks — too small, too short, not strong, the freckles, the cowlicks in his hair. Richie thinks he would die for him ten times over. Richie thinks he’s fucking perfect. He rolls into the melt of Eddie’s body. He hooks Eddie’s leg over his shoulder as he swallows him whole, as he gives him everything he has. And Eddie says _your mouth_ and it makes him moan again, palm tracing a heat line up along the outside of Eddie’s thigh where his skin is cool.

Eddie falls all but silent, stomach muscles tensing as the angle changes and makes his leg kick out in the air, mouth falling open on a soundless shout, then; “I’m gonna come—.” Breathless, just above a whisper, “you’re gonna make me come—“ eyes rolling into the back of his head to watch the fireworks display there as pleasure strips him down to the bones, as the muscle in his calf stretches until it pulls and burns, until he’s whimpering _Richie, Richie, Richie_ while he coats his tongue.

It’s different, Richie thinks, It’s so, so different. He swallows him down, and he tastes like the sea — brine and sharp, somewhere, and _Eddie, Eddie_. When he finally does pull away, he can taste him at the back of his teeth and there’s none of the nausea from the alleyway, no bitter tang of cigarettes and something thick and musky. He pushes it out of his mind before it can take over, slides up to cover him with his body, finds his wrists and pins him down, catching only his fingers so he can press his lips to each fluttering pulse point, then lets him go, braced on his elbow over him, pushing his glasses up properly where they’ve slid down his nose. He meets his eyes, wide-eyed, all wonder and then he smiles at him, grins wide, but almost shy and ducks his head, laughing softly. “Holy shit.”

“Richie.” Quiet, like it’s the only word he knows, smiling right back as he cranes up to catch their mouths together. “Can I sleep in here?” Because he doesn’t want to go back to his room. He doesn’t want to go back to a cold bed, alone. Curls himself into the spaces Richie's body leaves, face pressed into his neck, fingers running down his spine.

“What, you mean like, forever?” he asks, settling on his side, wrapping around him until he can’t get closer, “obviously, yes.” Takes his glasses off and doesn’t unplug the lights because they’re all the way at the foot of the bed. He just pulls the blankets up over them both and sighs into Eddie’s hair and thinks _I love you_ , but he falls asleep before he can get up the nerve to say it.

**xiv**

Felix knows. Eddie completely forget he has a key, and when he wakes up the next morning he can _feel_ the change in the apartment. Like someone’s been there without them knowing. Like a few years ago when they were burgled. He untangles himself from Richie, reluctant, pressing warm kisses to his sleeping mouth as he gets up and pulls his pyjamas on. Trails through to the kitchen to make coffee and finds the pot still warm. 

Richie is still asleep when Felix comes back with a grocery bag clutched to his chest, Eddie curled into a dining chair, fear thrumming through him as he listens to Felix putting food away.

“So.” And then he _panics_. Looks to Richie's room and then back up at him when he speaks. “Shall we say whatever happened last night was a drunken mistake? I noticed you smashed a wine glass. Did you hurt yourself?”

Eddie shakes his head, trembles when Felix leans across to take his hand between his, squeezing the bones until they crunch and he gasps. Felix smiles, squeezes harder and then drops them. Takes his coffee cup from in front of him and moves around the table to kneel in front of him, palms broad and cold on his face.

“Felix—,” the slap is maybe gentler than Felix thinks he deserves, but it still stings.

“Not now, Eddie. I don’t want to hear any excuses or apologies. It was a mistake. It won’t happen again. Do you understand?”

And Eddie nods. Thinks of LA and doesn’t cry.

**Author's Note:**

> Join us on tumblr!  
> [ **liminalweirdo**](https://liminalweirdo.tumblr.com/) and [**slowlimbs**](https://slowlimbs.tumblr.com/)


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